Two-Bit Pictures is Looking Forward: PART 2 - The Requirements

Friday May 6th was an agonizingly long day. I came to work for 8am like usual, sat through meetings as usual, and did other project management and engineering things... as usual. Work wasn’t what made that particular Friday so unbearable; knowing that I would be learning about our movie’s genre and the required character, line, and prop at 7pm is what really got under my skin. I was doing my best not to think about it but, of course, that only made me think about it more.

“Requirements?” you ask? Yes, there are requirements for the 48 Hour Film Project. Some of the blanket requirements are that all work, concepts, music, etc. must be done/occur within the 48 hour time frame. This means that no filming, writing, etc. should be done before the weekend of the local contest. (There are some exceptions to every rule and if you’d like to learn them, check out the 48 Hour Film Project website linked in Part 1.) To control the time frame of work as well as to make it more challenging (and a slightly more level playing field) each team has to choose a genre out of a hat. The website lists the genres for the current year’s tour so in theory you could plan out an idea for every genre beforehand (but that’s not very fun, is it?). Also, you get a mulligan and can re-choose if you don’t like your original pick, but you have to pick out of a different set of genres that may be much harder (like a western or a musical).

Each team blindly picks a genre so you can end up with 10 teams working on comedies, 15 working on dramas, and etc. etc. But there are three things that all of the teams have to include in their films: a character, a prop, and a line of dialogue. The character has to be on screen and clearly shown to be the character, the prop has to be incorporated into the story somehow, and the line of dialogue has to be said verbatim (or it doesn’t count). There are judging criteria and prizes for best use of the three as well as best use of genre. This year Boston’s requirements were:

Character: Uncle Hank OR Aunt Henrietta
Prop: a chess piece
Line: “I didn’t see that coming.”

Our fearless leader made his pick shortly before 7pm. “Film de femme” was written on the sheet of paper. What is “film de femme”? It is a genre created by the folks at the 48 Hour Film Project as a way to showcase female talent and strong female characters. He emailed us our requirements and we met at 9pm to craft a plot and write our script.

Check back for Part 3! (I bet it's already written!)