A Really Crazy Project (Raquel)
April 14, 2009 by sharppointythings
Last Wednesday I ran across the 36 hour Christian Filmmakers contest. The idea was to film a three minute video within the span of 36 hours, starting that Friday at noon. So, thought I, here is this nifty contest idea, and I know people who are also interested in this sort of thing, and during those 36 hours we have a hymn sing were we’d all be in the same place anyway so could very conveniently film something together. Being unphased about having two entire days notice on starting this project which also happened to fall on an already completely full weekend, which also happened to be the weekend of Resurrection Sunday, I began gathering co-conspirators.
My search for people as crazy as I am turned up, as you might guess, Jeremy D. (To give full credit, Seth also qualifies for being sufficiently crazy to do this project, but was distracted by the whole Crystal-going-into-labor thing.) In the ensuing two days I also managed to rope in Gabrielle and Moriah, send a flurry of e-mails planning the project, write a script, plan out camera shots, learn the basic of shooting video (with a borrowed camera), and for once, actually take Seth’s advice about not stressing out about the fact that it wouldn’t be perfect. Did I mention that I’d never worked on a film project before?
Actually shooting of the video was concetrated craziness, as I managed to direct and film our video in an unused Sunday School room while we all should have been eating supper. We had less than an hour of shooting time, and none of us knew what we were doing, but we had a lot of fun doing it. I wish I’d left the camera running more in between takes because we could have put together an amazing blooper reel. 
After hymn sing, I went home to edit the video for the contest (before midnight!), and ran into road block after road block, eventually finding that Windows Movie Maker locked up every time I tried to import video. I ended up down at the Ben-Ezras, watching the clock tick down towards midnight while Seth tried to find patches for the problems on the editing software and Crystal sat timing her contractions. In the end, it simply refused to work, and I didn’t get it in for the contest.
By Monday my software had spontaneously started working again, so I went ahead and put together the video. For me, at least, the whole thing was completely worth it, even we didn’t get to enter it in the contest. We had a ridiculous amount of fun, and we all realized that we’d like to do this again. Though maybe with a little more advance planning…
The blooper reel would’ve been great.
Also, you remember when I did the running slide on my knees next to Moriah? I shoulda said “Jimmy Johns!”
Thanks for organizing this! It was a ton of fun!