Close But No Cigar: 48 Hours of Puppet Filled Craziness

Make a film in 48 hours? Sure, why the heck not. How naïve those words seem now. 48Hours Furious Film Making is New Zealand’s largest film competition. The premise is simple: write, shoot and edit a film in a specified 48 hour time frame. We had seen it on television, and read about the competition before. We had even talked about entering. Then one fateful day Mark (a fellow film maker) told us that he had a team registered and that registrations closed within a week. Wow, a week? I suppose I had best see if people are still interested and put our name in. Fortunately (or not, depends on your perspective) people were excited about the idea. Bus of the Undead was now officially entered into 48Hours 2006.

So what does 48Hours involve? Other than the obvious write, shoot, edit time constraints, entrants were given elements mere minutes before the competition began to include in their entry to prove that they hadn’t started early. Each team sent representatives down to their local venue to receive these mystery elements, while the rest of the team remained at their prospective base of operations eagerly awaiting the news. When it hit 7pm on March 26th, representatives were released, free to call their team mates. The competition had begun - the time was counting down for every team to get their entry in.

These elements were essential to our film. We were given character names and personality traits to include in the film, as well as a prop and line of dialogue. Perhaps most crucial was the chosen genre. While the other elements were constant across every team, genre was chosen at random from a pool for each team. Some of the possible genres included staples such as romance, road trip, horror or sci fi, and of course there are the wonderful mystery genres as chosen by The Man Himself – Peter Jackson.

7pm hits, and back at BOTU headquarters the tension is palpable. All phone calls were rather rudely diverted away (sorry Mike, we needed those lines free). A few agonising minutes pass and the phone call we had all been hoping for was answered. Finally all would be revealed! Our genre, the character name, everything! And that is when we heard the most unanticipated word of the weekend: Puppet.

Needless to say, Daniel’s face dropped. Puppet – wtf? What kind of genre is puppet? Minutes passed. What the hell are we going to do? Ideas about the genre and what we should do were thrown about at speed and just as quickly shot down. We just didn’t have an idea of what to do at all. Puppet was looking to be bogging us down. But then an epiphany struck. Puppet doesn’t necessarily constrain you – you just have to apply puppets to another appropriate genre.

Daniel and Tim had been discussing the various genres in the lead up to the event, categorising those which would be fun and those which would prove painful. While puppet never even crossed our minds, the idea of a retro serial-style Science Fiction film was discussed fondly. This is what we would use. Retro sci fi would be the answer to all of our lack of inspiration. Not only was it cool to do, but it fit puppet to a tee – we could link the idea with such puppet classics as ‘Captain Scarlett’, ‘Thunderbirds’ or ‘Terrahawks’.

What had seemed like an uphill battle had now become a plan of action. The premise was laid out, scenes hastily discussed, ideas for required props and characters quickly materialised. Within a very short time frame (considering how long it felt at the time) the team was mobilised and we began sourcing prop materials and organising sets. We were so quick we were even able to get down to The Warehouse in time to buy supplies on the Friday night.

The story was simple: Hank Nova was our lead, a self absorbed space-jock with a gorgeous blonde mullet. Robin Slade (our required character) was an eternally optimistic robot, pal and sidekick to Hank. A damsel in distress was decided upon, known only as Highschool Sweetheart, a parody of pre-feminist gender stereotypes in film and television, complete with feather duster. A villain was needed, and a live action bad guy seemed to fit the bill. He would eventually be named ‘General Mayhem’ – a lame name, but it was all we could come up with at the time.

And what villain is complete without minions? Squid minions were an easy solution, basically a mouth and eyes attached to rubber gloves creating quick and effective puppet bad guys. Last but not least, was our ‘helpful native’ – a squirrel puppet turned inside out. His role was to aid our heroes in finding the captured Highschool Sweetheart while underlining Hank’s arrogance and Robin’s optimism. Hank and Robin would attempt to rescue Highschool sweetheart and foil General Mayhem’s plot to destroy the Earth. Sounds basic right?

With the rough plot set out, Daniel took time to liaise with Skim Milk about our 48hours soundtrack. With rather vague information, and no concrete storyboards or time lengths for scenes he set out to work on the project. He began creating various themes which could be applied at appropriate points in the film, based on heroic moments, villainous moments, the arrival of certain characters, etc.

Meanwhile construction began in earnest with Erin called in to paint backdrops assisted by Lauren, all based on excruciatingly vague pencil sketches done by Daniel. John and Andrew whom had been on a ‘fact finding expedition’ (complete with Beer drinking and running through scenes of Flash Gordon for inspiration) arrived to pitch in, while Tim and Daniel worked on the rapidly emerging Robin Slade robot, lovingly crafted from a beer can that Daniel had just finished. The drops of beer remaining on the inside would prove troublesome for construction purposes, as Tim can attest.

Cass after her initial run to get supplies from The Warehouse, left again with Callumn to obtain her sewing machine and any other useful items (of which she had plenty) from her home 13km away and brought it back to be set up in our kitchen. Again based on sketches (perhaps a little less vague this time, but still pretty poorly drawn) Cass and Callumn hunkered down to begin work on our actors. This would prove a very timely endeavour, but ultimately they looked awesome as the film will testify. Construction had exploded, and the state of the house floor showed signs of it everywhere. Cardboard, fabric, and all manner of adhesive tape stretched as far as the eye could see.

The initial design period stretched further into the night, with people trailing off to go to sleep/home/work at various hours of the early morning. We weren’t quite where we needed to be – the majority of the tasks were in an unfinished state, requiring more time/materials to be completed – but we really hit the point where we needed to do further supply shopping. This couldn’t really take place until after 9am on Saturday morning, so everyone managed some sleep.

The dawning of a new day. Daniel begins rousing people from their beds, some less delighted to be awake than others. Daniel got up after 3 hours sleep to begin working on the Spaceship set. As various team members begin to appear, and breakfast is prepared we get back into work mode. John, Andrew, Lauren, and I’m sure many other people make a ridiculous number of treks to various stores as we realise we need supplies. Thank goodness we were close to the CBD and that Cell Phones exist.

John begins to work diligently on the Death Ray, while almost everyone else is finishing up items from the night before. Slight modifications are made to Robin giving him a mouth made of LED lights. Ben rigged up a receiver which caused the lights to go on when sound was received by a unit on the base of Robin’s support rod. With the arrival of spray paint the props get a beautiful sci fi silver finish. The tree stump outside our house still shows where this took place.

Daniel gets into costume in preparation for filming the live action Villain scenes. With the puppets and more importantly pretty much all of the sets still needing further work this seems the best course of action. While it was later than we had hoped (filming began 2 hours late at 1pm), it was good to finally have something in the can – especially considering we were over 1/3 of the way through our time limit.

So we get some filming done, all seems to be going well. Things begin to blur into each other at this stage. Things are so frantic that Daniel doesn't even get entirely out of costume, and has his stupid jewellery taken off him by one of the crew while he is sitting at the computer editing. And his hair remained stupid and slicked back for the duration. Over the next 30 hours we build about five sets for the puppets with cardboard and paint, and spend about another 10 hours 'filming'. We were still building sewts at about 1am while simlutanaeously filming in Tims appropriated bedroom. The contents of his room have been shifted into the bathroom for the meanwhile.

Editing is done on the fly as footage and time becomes available. As we begin to approach deadline we get far more frantic. We've got sounds to put in and music to grab. Last minute pickups are done downstairs while editing is being done upstairs. Bubbles the cat makes a hasty apprerance in the film, giving us the shots we need to close the episode. Scott has prepared a fantastic soundtrack ready for us to align, but it turns out that somewhere along the way the timecode has gotten out of whack. Since he is sending the music via FTP from Japan, its not so easy to get him to realign it, and we have to make do. The sound effects for the second act go mysteriously missing, and are nowhere to be found on the machine they were assembled on.

So we are making very last minute fixes to this stuff, we have a few sound effects in place for the second act, but have absolutely no time to do the fight scene SFX. We are adjusting the soundtrack as we are able, and things might just be working fine. Then we do the 25 minute render of each act and assemble it all on one computer. We've just got to put it onto tape and get it to the venue. It is going to be close, but we should make it in by about three minutes.

And then the camera refuses to recognise, and we are unable to export the film to DV tape.

We switch cameras, still no luck. Plug the old one in again. Hooray! So we are just about finished exporting when we see the time tick over. Turns out that we wasted about six minutes changing cameras around, and that was all it took to make us late. All in all, we end up just over the deadline. A sad end to an otherwise fantastic weekend.

But all is not lost! Rather than just retreat and go to sleep, we end up hanging out until about 2am on Monday morning talking crap! We had a great time and are all looking forward to 48Hours 2007. We know what we can do to improve our work flow, and what we did wrong in 2006. Watch this space!

UPDATE: We entered again in 2007, and got the film in on time! Click here to check out our 2007 48Hours entry - Eye of the Beholder