I treated this more as an exercise for what production at school is going to be like: all new cast and crew, not editing it myself and instead collaborating with an Editor I haven't worked with before, coming up with the story by more of a roundtable style, etc. It was interesting working with an exec producer with exactly opposite sensibilities from my own, as we were able to sort of meet in the middle. He wants to make religious films, and was looking for something that was more family friendly. I wanted to do my usual thing, and I feel like we held each other in check pretty well. No lame christian kids-movie preaching stuff was allowed from his end, and I turned in more of a toned down crowd pleasing film in the process. Though I did get to sneak some crazy time travel stuff in there, and a guy gets his arm cut off, so maybe it's not so different from my normal style.
The the original 48 Hour cut wasn't very successful in my opinion, as we had some editing and sound problems, and weren't able to color correct it. It basically wasn't up to my normal level, and I wasn't happy with it when I turned it in. We made the deadline though (this wasn't going to be my first late 48 Hour film) but I felt it needed a bit more work.
In the end it won the Audience Choice award for our screening without having anyone from our team there to stuff the ballots, so I guess it played well enough. And I knew we had enough to do a better cut after the fact, which is all that matters in the end. Overall, I feel it was a successful weekend and we got a fun little movie out of it.
The Nature of Time from The Upthink Lab on Vimeo.
