It was January of 2017 when I had decided to hop into the ring of competitive filmmaking. No, I wasn’t the director of this one. That credit goes to my fantastic friend, Tanner Smith. For years, this guy has been directing movies and making documentaries all around the Arkansas area. He competed in the annual 48-HR Film Festival in Little Rock back in 2016 and he was determined to do it again in the summer of 2017.
In January of that year, he called up both me and his girlfriend, Kelly Woodruff, and asked if she was going to join in. Of course she said yes, but to his surprise, I had chimed in and wanted to join up. When he competed in 2016, he had asked me if I wanted to join. However, at the time, I didn’t have a job and therefore couldn’t afford the trip. But 2017 was the year where I had a job and I felt my life started to become steady enough to where I could certainly afford the expenses with the payout of getting in touch with my creative side. And so it was on. However, what ended up happening, was more than what I thought was going to happen. But it became a lesson about what goes on in this competition.
So basically, how this works is teams from around the Little Rock area come together to make a film in exactly 48 hours. On the day of kick off, each team gets to pick a random set of two genres. This is so we can’t plan out our films in advance. Yet, of the two that we receive, we must choose only one that can be made into a film. Aside from that, the company gives every team a prop, a character that can be either male or female, and a line of dialogue. All of these must be in the film and these are things that every team will have so no team will have a different prop or line of dialogue or character. So for 2017, we had to have tongs as our prop, Landon Plinter as the name of our male character (I forgot what the female name was) and I believe the line of dialogue was “Why won’t you tell me?”
Originally I was going to be one of the editors on the film. But because our original Director of Photography had backed out at the last minute, I took on the role of both Co-Editor and Director of Photography. These things do happen though. And in the time span of 48 hours, you must work with what you got. Or who you have, in this case. Our genres we had picked were Romance and Period Piece, so we decided to make a film about a guy that wanted to propose to his girlfriend on New Years Eve in 1999.
We classified the film as a Period Piece instead of a Romance, because we had decided that genre fit the film best. The film was included in the top 13 best of screening list. What that means, is out of the 24 films that were submitted, only 13 were picked to go on to a special screening known as the “best of screening.” At this screening, awards were given out to films that won certain categories, like best directed, best edited, best use of the line, best use of prop, best use of the character, best music, etc. So kind of like the academy’s or the oscars, only catered to the 48-HR film festival.
When Tanner competed in 2016, his film didn’t even make the best of screening list. This film not only made the best of screening list, but it was nominated for one category. Best Editing. This struck me hard, because out of all of the films I had made or helped to make, I have never been recognized for any of them. This film that I had helped to make, not only made it in a festival, but it was nominated at said film festival. Aside from the nomination, this was the very first film festival I was ever apart of. It left me beyond words.
Nicole Rousseau 