I have just finished the annual BEA 48 hour film competition. (Here is their website.) This competition is open to active college and university students. During this competition BEA provides teams with a genre, a prop, a character, and a line of dialogue. Each of these have to be featured in this movie.
I was the director of the team called the Urchin Emergence. We were a group of 6 students and 1 overseeing professor. Our genre was horror, the line of dialogue was: “Is that AI?”, our prop we had to use was a red pepper, and our character was James Henry. There were things we did right and things we could have improved on. I would like to share some advice and things that I learned during this experience.
Looking back, this is my advice in order of importance:
Break your film up into at least three segments, such as act one, act two, act three. You can have more, just label them Act 1A etc. Splitting the footage up is a way for multiple people to work on editing at the same time.
MOST IMPORTANT ADVICE - Designate one computer to work on each Act. DO NOT MOVE the footage from that computer. Everything for act one goes to that computer to be edited. The music, the sound effects, audio, everything. This way the files don’t get mixed up. We did not follow this. We tried to get multiple people working as possible. So we transferred files from one computer to another using a hard drive. By having multiple files no one knew which one they should work on. Not knowing which file was the correct one, people ended up editing the wrong file. In the end, it caused a lot of confusion. We forgot the title card so we tried to add our completed film into the title sequence. However the title sequence was much smaller dimensions than our film and we shrunk our high quality film to fit. When we played it back it was terrible quality. With about 10 minutes before the deadline we had to fix it while panic was setting in. We had to scramble to fix it and we missed simple things that we shouldn’t have.
Check your equipment before filming, especially audio. One of our other groups had to refilm nearly half of their footage because the audio didn’t work.
Work on splicing the footage together first. Once the act has the highest quality clips that flow into each other, then you can focus on effects, transitions and color correcting. If you don’t have an ending, it won’t matter if the transitions are great.
When saving/backing up your editing process, save everything in a new folder as a different version. Use a back up drive if possible. Your folders would look like:
Movie
Act 1
Act 1 Version 1
Act 1 Version 2
Act 2
Act 2 Version 1 etc.
This is going to save you in case something goes wrong. You can go back to the previous version and start again.
Lighting, camera angles, and quality video seems to be valued more than acting, and writing ability.
Export a test file and play it on a bigger screen. When you are editing, there are things you can miss because of a smaller viewing window. Be sure to label this as something with the word “test” in it so it doesn’t get mistaken for the final. Something like “Act1Test.mp4” would work.
Check all of the rules over and over again. They want very specific things such as: a title card both in front and in back. One of our teams forgot the title card at the end, and only realized it after they had submitted the video. They emailed the correct video before the deadline, but we are not sure if it will be accepted or not.
Give yourself at least 5 minutes of upload time when submitting the video. You probably won’t need this, but it will help you not miss your time. Our video took longer than expected to upload. As a result it was submitted at 5:01 instead of 5:00. We may be disqualified for this but we don’t know yet.
Overall this was a fun (albeit stressful) competition. Each of us learned a lot of stuff about creating a short film. I hope this is helpful to you.
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