Some things bear repeating...some things don't

This year I participated with this project. Actually as I type this I have just recovered from the weekend of "shooting" a 5 1/2 minute film. I was asked by a group of people at work as well as some people I went to High School with and other folks that I know to join them in this for this year. They did it last year and had a lot of fun so I figured "why not."

The purpose of this competition is to show up someplace at a designated time where all participants receive a common a) Character name b) prop and c) catch phrase. Then each group basically draws out of a hat to see what genre of film they have to make. If you don't like what you drew you can opt for a "wildcard" which allows you to take a second pick of what's left. Once each group has received all of that, they then have 48 hours to write, shoot, edit, and produce their films and drop them off back at the main office. They are then reviewed and judged to see who wins. The winner of each city then competes regionally. The regional winners compete nationally, and the national winners then compete internationally.

We decided beforehand that we should be prepared for whatever genre that we may pick, so we had a couple meetings as a big group and came up with script ideas for each category that we could possibly end up picking. We had some good stuff. Then whoever came up with the best idea for each genre had to write up a mini script to present to the group director a few days before the project began. We all did so.

We had decided that if we ended up drawing Action/Adventure, Spy, or Western/Musical that we were going to opt for the wildcard. I had written up a script though that most of our group liked for the Spy genre. It was basically about a peeping tom neighbor who thinks that he sees one of his neighbors get murdered. Everybody liked it....

Well, to make a long story short we ended up getting Spy and the "director" of our group in conjunction with only one other person decided on the spot that we were not going to use what we had already drafted (against their own assurance to the group that they weren't going to do that again). So we ended up doing a "Zombie Spy Movie."

For whatever reason our leader wanted to make a stupid zombie movie out of whatever category we picked...and they wanted whatever we picked to also have a lot of comedy in it. Personally I have only seen one zombie movie that actually did comedy well Shaun of the Dead. We certainly could not do another one of those. Anywhoo...the majority of the group scoffed at the director's ideas and did not like them. So we ended up with more than 3/4 of the cast and crew, myself included, completely unhappy with what we were making. However, we had already committed to helping out with the understanding that this was "our" movie and not his. At least for me, that is what kept me there. I mean, right from the beginning arguments of our commencement meeting on Friday night when I heard someone say that this was so-and-so's movie...I was ready to leave because that is not what I was told from the beginning.

The movie was completed with plenty of time to get it back to the drop off point...but most of us felt like this- The film was put together well. It had a) good music that fit the scenes b) good editing that made it flow c) good makeup d) good editing with nice effects

But the story, which was the biggest part completely sucked. We gave a lot of thought to whether we would do this again next year or not. At least with the same full group of people.

I vote no. I vote for the drilling everyone involved to make sure that we're all on the same page from the beginning and if people aren't willing to stick to the plan then they're out.

The director is still my friend and I still like him and a lot of his ideas but on this one he failed.

Perhaps it was rather the rest of us who failed for letting it happen since we so greatly outnumbered him.