The Dink Network

I'm leaving tomorrow for the 48-hour film festival in Aberdeen, South Dakota. My cousin Derek is the one filming and editing mostly. He just spent $6,000 on a new camera and crane. We've got some music done by his brother we can use. I watched some of the winners from last year, they all completely sucked except for about 3 (there were 20 total), and 2 of those were from England. So I'm not much worried about competition.

How it works: The main producer (Derek, in this case) draws a genre (some of them are superhero, comedy, horror, musical/western...), and a prop, character, and line of dialogue that must be in it. You can't do anything for it until after you draw, then you have 48 hours to write, film, and edit. The only thing you can do beforehand is music.

The only team we think will be real competition is the Minneapolis team. The grand prize is a film editing suite worth about $10,000. I'll let you know how we do on Sunday night.

Cool, that sounds like fun.

My team won the Gulf Coast Film Festival...of corse it was nothing like that, we had weeks, but it is still hard either way...

Good Luck Though

I just got back last night. The genre for us was comedy (too easy!), the prop was a baseball bat, the line of dialogue was "Where in the world did you find that?", and the character was T. Monroe, plumber. It turned out great, but I won't find out who won until after the public viewing. The movie has to be 4-7 minutes, but one minute of credits doesn't count against it, so it was harder to tell the story. Anyway, by the end of the movie 5/6 of the characters die (one gets impaled by a plunger). I didn't act, instead I did the hardest part of the audio: boom pole operator. Yeah, I'll let you all know who won after a few days.

Well?

Well, I found out a couple weeks back we didn't get first place (some professional studio did), but we got an award for "Best Use of Character".