A short story of three goals in service of long term prospects, covering the Big Bang to Eternity in about 1000 words.
Read The Third Goal here:
48 Hours, one weekend, to make an entire short film? From concept to writing to shooting, editing, and final film. Could you do it? The answer is almost certainly, yes.
We’ve been doing it here for 10 years as part of Washington DC’s 48 Hour Film Project!
For those who don’t know, the challenge outlined above is exactly how the 48 Hour Film Project works. On Friday evening, you receive several prompts: A required character, line of dialogue, prop, and a choice of two genres, before your set loose to make a movie and turn it in by Sunday evening. It’s a ton of fun, and it’s been a rather important part of my own filmmaking journey over the years. Now, having completed our 10th year as part of this community, I wanted to take a look back at the various shorts we’ve made over the years:
RED AND BLACK VENGEANCE - 2013
Directed by Ted Hogeman
Team: Jack Kamensky, Emily Wilson, Justin Mawdsley, Kevin Gollogly, Jonathan Oh, Alicia Woock, Sam Tennison
Our very first 48 Hour Film Project!
Coming from having done William and Mary’s 24 Speed, a film challenge where the goal is to make an entire short film in less than a day, I have to admit, I kind of thought it would be a cakewalk at first. I was so very wrong.
Jack Kamensky helps set up a scene with actor Emily Wilson
Makeup Artist Alicia Woock puts the final touches on actor Jonathan Oh
Justin Mawdsley in makeup for the final scene of Red and Black Vengeance
I don’t think we even had a script when we first started shooting, with most of the lines and performances improvised by the actors, and it turns out the go-go-go style of staying awake and powering through, which was my usual modus operandi for 24 Speed back then, really didn’t translate well to a full 48 hour stretch. There’s a scene where I get kicked and go down, and that happened at about hour 35, late on Saturday night, and I stayed down for a little while, just kind of exhausted.
Things didn’t get any easier when we got to the edit. Our reach had definitely exceeded our grasp, and there were a couple of scenes we had planned that we didn’t ever get around to filming, so putting the short together felt like it was going to be impossible. Our Sunday deadline came and went, and the film still wasn’t done, and I felt myself sinking into despair, considering not even turning it in.
But a few hours after the deadline passed, I got a call from one of the editors at the 48HFP, who asked when we might be turning it in. I told him I wasn’t sure that I should, and he replied, “Don’t you want to turn in your movie? I mean, you’ll get to see it on the big screen.” I figured I owed it to my team to finish the project, so I agreed to meet up with him in person to drop it off via USB stick. When I got to his place, he was so chill, and nice, congratulating me on even just getting the film made, and it was exactly the pep talk I needed at that moment where I was feeling so down and like I’d failed.
Going into the actual screening a week or so later, I was terrified we would have the worst film there, having watched a lot of awesome and hilarious winning films from prior years. But stepping into the fantastic Art Deco style AFI Silver in Silver Spring for the first time, seeing our film on that gorgeous cinema screen, and hearing people laugh at our jokes, even a couple of ooohs and aaahs at our martial arts sequences, it changed things.
Yeah, this short film wasn’t our finest work, but a lot of the films that day were somewhat rough, and that was fine! It really felt like all of us were sharing in the joy of making something, rather than judging each other for where we missed the mark. It was an incredible, welcoming experience, and that’s something I’ve tried to carry in myself as a filmmaker ever since: to take part in the joy and creativity of filmmaking, and be similarly welcoming towards other filmmakers. Even someone relatively new to the craft may have an interesting, unexpected take on things. And I was hooked.
SELLOUTS - 2014
Directed by Ted Hogeman
Team: Zan Gilles, Emily Wilson, Kristen Hopkins, Mohammed Rahman, Chris Mariles, Jonathan Oh
Back in these days, we tended to handle story as a whole team, bouncing ideas off each other on Friday night. One weird bit of trivia, Sellouts is kind of the story of itself. While we came to the idea of an alien occupation story pretty quickly, our team was split on how serious vs silly the movie should be, with Chris and I pushing for a more serious, straight-laced movie, and a few of the other cast members wanting to do a themed dance party montage. The slow dolly in to Zan’s face is a pretty accurate reflection of how I was feeling at times during that writing process.
The cast of Sellouts: Kristen Hopkins, Mohammed Rahman, Zan Gillies, Emily Wilson, Ted Hogeman
DP Christopher Mariles on the set of Sellouts
That said, this was the first year we were on time! And looking back at it, there are a few moments that have held up surprisingly well. I’m rather proud of the acting chops displayed in Zan and Emily’s sandwich exchange, and I’d forgotten about the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, delightfully grim 20 dollar gag at the very end of the short, which ranks as one of my favorite beats in a short I’ve directed.
BRUCE V CLARK - 2016
Directed by Kristen Hopkins
Team: Eddy Schuler, Alex Holt, Ryan Siegel, Stephanie Sickler, Ted Hogeman, Nate Raiche, Pratyush Dubey, Doug Dietz
My friend and frequent collaborator Kristen Hopkins had directed her first short, In Retrospect, back in 2015, and wanted to try her hand at directing a 48 Hour Film Project as well. I was happy to back her up on the technical side, providing the camera and sound equipment. Together with the team, we brainstormed something that was a hybrid Sports-Film/Romantic Comedy, and filmed in Meridian Hill park in DC.
Director Kristen Hopkins and Ted Hogeman at a 48 Hour Film Project Premiere at the AFI Silver
Kristen is a natural director and storyteller, and it felt so good to just be able to focus on helping her bring her ideas to life, instead of trying to manage both directing and technical aspects at the same time that year. I’ve also learned so much about what I’m asking of my crew as a director by helping her over several projects.
Some of the crew of Bruce v Clark: Ted Hogeman, Nate Raiche, Kristen Hopkins, Doug Dietz, Pratyush Dubey
FUN FACT: The team name Speed Sloth comes from a picture on the back of Kristen’s phone case of a sloth on a stripper pole…we thought it would be funny to go with a Sloth as our logo, given the go-go-go constant movement energy of the 48HFP.
The original Speed Sloth Logo
HOLDING GROUND - 2017
Directed by Kristen Hopkins
Team: Zan Gillies, Eddy Schuler, Ted Hogeman, Nate Raiche, Sarah Smith, Dillion Frye, Amy Vance, Dean Wallace, Julian Turim, Haley Trost, Jason Turim, Jenna Leventoff
Kristen returned to direct, Zan Gillies and I helped with the story and later with editing. The largest cast of any of our 48 Hour Film Project shorts, Kristen also deserves recognition for producing and managing to get all the extras and securing the location for the short.
Behind the scenes of Holding Ground
At the best of screening, we ended up winning several awards, including Best Director! Also, Zan Gillies, actor, writer, editor extraordinaire, made a pretty kickass poster for it:
MISE EN PLACE - 2018
Directed by Kristen Hopkins
Team: Zan Gillies, Nate Raiche, Neil Fitzgerald, Chris Mariles, Ted Hogeman
This was the short where we really feel like we hit our stride at the 48 Hour Film Project! It’s one of my favorite shorts we’ve ever done, about life, mystery, and how strange it is when big thoughts brush up against the banalities of life in modern day America. I also still find it really funny to have the required character just be dead on the floor, which got us some notoriety in the community for a couple of years afterwards, as the creators of the ‘Dead Chef’ film. The chef’s hat in the short is a Kristen Hopkins special creation, made using only tape and paper towels.
Director Kristen Hopkins gives notes to actors Zan Gillies and Nate Raiche
Zan and I had a bunch of fun with the poster design after the shoot, leading to several gag versions:
PSYCHO KILLER - Sci-fi and Horror - 2018
Directed by Ted Hogeman
Team: Kristen Hopkins, Brian Terrill, Christine Haley, Zan Gilles, Dirk Dupree, Sallie Keena, Teddy Sliceyhands
My first time back directing a 48HFP short in several years! The basic story is a riff on a previous short we’d made, where a petite cheerleader-esque woman acts as the slasher villain to a group of zombies out in the woods. Also, we wanted to have some gonzo fun.
Behind the scenes of Psycho Killer with Kristen Hopkins, Christine Haley, and Zan Gillies
Another fun fact - back in 2018, Apple and Nvidia were in a tiff over who was messing with who’s software, and the NVidia graphics card in my Macbook Pro had a tendency to kind of glitch out when it was processing heavily, as say, happens when one is video editing, which led to one of my favorite behind the scenes videos:
Thankfully, we were still to finish it and get it turned in on time.
The poster for Psycho Killer
MISE EN TROUBLE - 2019
Directed by Kristen Hopkins
Team: Zan Gillies, Ted Hogeman
In 2019, we had a very small team due to several of our regular collaborators not being available, so it was just Kristen, Zan, and myself. Kristen and I still wanted to make something for the 48HFP, because it was a tradition for us at some point, so we decided to go for it.
After we got our genres at the kickoff, including for Detective / Cop, an idea started percolating on the ride home: We’d always talked about how the ideal 48HFP production would just be a couple of characters talking in a single location, but weren’t sure how to make it interesting. We realized that with our limited team that year, a police interrogation might be a good place to start…and what should that interrogation be except for the aftermath of the dead chef incident from Mise en Place?
Kristen Hopkins and Zan Gillies work on the script for Mise en Trouble.
Thus, our first 48HFP Sequel was born. This was a really exciting short for me personally, because with both Zan and Kristen acting in front of the camera, it was up to me to wizard-of-Oz all the technical aspects - lighting, sound, camera, from behind the scenes. I learned a lot of good tricks on that shoot, and it still feels like a bit of a flex that we were able to pull off that short with such a small and scrappy team.
The Tabletop dolly rig used to shoot Mise en Trouble
Also, I would be remiss not to give a shoutout to the webseries ‘I’m Donny and You Suck at Photoshop’, which inspired a lot of my vocal cameo as Kevin Paltran, podcaster and Rebecca Copkins’s (played by Kristen Hopkins) soon to be ex-husband. That webseries was literally how I learned photoshop back in the day.
FIRST CONTACT WORST CONTACT - Sci-Fi and Horror - 2019
Directed by Ted Hogeman
Team: Kristen Hopkins, Orlando Suazo, Brian Terrill, Christopher Mariles, Chris Broholm, Patrick McCleary
The idea for this short came about over Korean chicken wings at BBQ Chicken in Falls Church, with Kristen, DP Chris Mariles, and I kicking out ideas for ‘Aliens’ as a genre.
The next day, we spent a long, long time converting Chris’s garage into spaceship. It took hours, far longer than I’d planned, with frequent collaborator Brian Terrill and Kristen helping convert the space. I was getting pretty nervous about how long we’d actually have to shoot the film, but Chris said to trust him, and I’m so glad that I did. When we finally set foot inside the garage in the late afternoon, it was like magic. We managed to knock out all our principle shots within 5 hours, sticking within our original 12 hour day plan.
Boom Operator Christopher Broholm on the set of First Contact Worst Contact
The next day, I edited on my laptop while Chris shot all our nebula and spaceship effects practically in the garage. The editing process was like something out of Star Trek, because I’d accidentally grabbed the wrong charger for my laptop, and it was slowly losing power as I was racing to finish the edit both before our deadline, and before my laptop cut out completely (I’m givin’ her all I’ve got captain, shields down to 60%!). The film was finally finished on the drive back to DC from Frederick, using my phone as a hotspot to download the music tracks for the soundtrack.
Kristen Hopkins looks over the glass plate used for Nebula effects for First Contact Worst Contact
Thankfully, we turned it in on time, and at the best of screening a few weeks later, we actually ended up winning the whole enchilada, being awarded Best Film for sci-fi and horror 2019!
DP Christopher Mariles and Director Ted Hogeman, moments after turning in First Contact Worst Contact
CAUSAL FRIDAY - 2021
Directed by Ted Hogeman
Team: Brian Terrill, Gopi Jayaprakash, Christine Haley, Sudeshna Mukherjee
While we felt like we were on a roll in 2019, the global Covid Pandemic kind of brought us and the rest of the world to a screeching halt in 2020. Causal Friday was actually my first time gathering people to make a movie in a couple years, as it had felt kind of unsafe to do so before we were able to be vaccinated (thanks, Science!)
It felt really good to get back into the game, and I was able to work with new collaborator Gopi J on the project (and you can check out a couple of his shorts here and here), as well as the first time my then-fiance (now wife) Sudeshna Mukerjee helped me make a movie!
Director Ted Hogeman, DP Gopi J, AC Kaye Haley, and Producer Sudeshna Mukherjee on location for Causal Friday
FIVE ONE THREE
Directed by Ted Hogeman
Team: Zan Gillies, Kristen Hopkins, Samson Binutu, Brian Terrill, Nate Raiche, Christine Haley, Sudeshna Mukherjee
Inexplicable Space Movie! Okay, okay, so the real explanation is that I’d been experimenting with some practical spaceship effects in the wake of FIRST CONTACT WORST CONTACT, and I wanted to continue those experiments for our 48HFP short that year. I do feel a little bad that the mystery element got a little blasted out of the script between revisions with Zan Gillies and myself.
Lead actor Zan Gillies slates for himself for Five One Three
Kristen Hopkins enjoys a bowl of cereal in order to slip the required prop into Five One Three
Director Ted Hogeman shoots spacecraft miniature effects for Five One Three
This was also an experiment in using a sketch effect over the footage, something I’d done on several prior shorts, which you can see in the Behind the Scenes Video here:
These rather ambitious experiments with new techniques ended up costing us though - I turned in the film in 8 hours late.
I still have quite a soft spot for Five One Three, however, and it’s a story world I’d be very interested in revisiting at some point.
INFORMATIONAL HUMAN CENTRIC VACATION FILM
Directed by Ted Hogeman
Team: Israel Rosenfeld, Matt Blackerby, Marriya Schwarz, Bobby Kogan, Sudeshna Mukherjee, Kristen Hopkins, June Siegel, Gopi Jayaprakash, Nikki Smallwood, Christine Haley, Silvana Smith
Inexplicable Space Movie 2! The story behind this one is that the required prop was a frisbee, after which 48 Hour Film Project creator Mark Ruppert added, “Or any other flying disc”, which got my imagination churning and wondering if flying saucers counted.
I’d been playing with Midjourney, the generative AI image creator app that year, and I was really curious to see how it would perform under the tight time constraints of the 48 Hour Film Project. This year was also fun because in addition to working with some old friends who’ve helped us out on several of these shorts, I was also able to work with some talented new collaborators like Nikki Smallwood, Marriya Schwarz, and Israel Rosenfeld.
The cast and crew of INFORMATIONAL HUMAN CENTRIC VACATION FILM: Bobby Kogan, Nikki Smallwood, Christine Haley, Israel Rosenfeld, Sudeshna Mukherjee, Gopi J, Matt Blackerby, and director Ted Hogeman in front
Cast and crew of INFORMATIONAL HUMAN CENTRIC VACATION FILM: Gopi J, Nikki Smallwood, Marriya Schwarz, Silvana Smith, Matt Blackerby, Sudeshna Mukherjee, Christine Haley, Israel Rosenfeld, Ted Hogeman
Also, Midjourney turned out to be a lot of fun during the filmmaking weekend, helping us pull off some crazy stuff that I’m not sure would have been possible without it.
So that’s it, 10 years at the 48 Hour Film Project. It’s been great to be part of such a welcoming, big-tent filmmaking community, both locally in DC, and as part of the global 48 Hour Film Project (which now takes place in over a hundred cities all around the world)! I’m also so grateful for the sense of community I have with my team, and my frequent collaborators (Hey there Kristen Hopkins, Chris Mariles, and many others!). I’ve learned so much from making these short films under the tight time pressure of the 48HFP, but it’s also been a safe place to make mistakes and try things I might otherwise think are beyond us. There’s also more than a little bit of hometown filmmaking pride in the 48HFP - it was actually founded in Washington DC by Mark Ruppert!
Closing out, I’d like to say thanks to all the people who’ve joined our teams to bring these short films to life (especially Kristen Hopkins and Chris Mariles!). And so much gratitude
to the people behind the scenes at the DC 48 Hour Film Project itself: THANK YOU Christina Ruppert, Mark Ruppert, James Lewis, Stephanie Cristancho, and everyone else involved over the years in making this a great community to be a part of, and inspiring so, so many strange and wonderful short films. Glad to have been a part of it for over a decade!
Bryan Mitchell as Ronnie Wilkins in See You Soon
Nikki Smallwood and Ted Hogeman on the set of See You Soon.
A couple of weeks ago, laughing with the storm ran a team in the 2024 Washington DC 48 Hour Film Project. For those who are new to the idea, the 48HFP is a yearly film event in cities all over the world where teams have a single weekend to write, shoot, and edit a short film based on several prompts (we’ve done it a few times before).
This year, I wanted to flex my writing and directing muscles with a darker, more dramatic story. I had also just met an actor that I was really excited to work with, Bryan Mitchell, on a shoot the previous week (Lobsters at Beach Party Point, directed by friend and frequent collaborator Brian Terrill).
The cover image for Lobsters at Beach Party Point, directed by Brian Terrill
Bryan Mitchell as Crabacus in Lobsters at Beach Party Point
This was an experimental project in a couple of ways, both the style and tone of the short (normally we aim for more comedic and cartoonish stories under such tight time constraints), and also with the technology. Almost all of the short is filmed on an iPhone 15 Pro Max, which actually made filming much faster and easier.
The iPhone 15 Pro Max used as A-Cam on See You Soon, with the Blackmagic Camera App.
I also wanted to explore a visual effect that I’ve been playing with for a few years now, that I call the sketch effect. It’s not quite roto-scoping (and takes a lot less work), but has a bit of that look and feel. We did a pretty in depth look at how it works in the Behind the Scenes for our short Five One Three last year (Sketch effect stuff at 00:50):
Bryan Mitchell as Ronnie Wilkins in See You Soon
The resulting short from this weekend, See You Soon, premieres tonight at the AFI Silver Theater at 9:30pm. Really curious to see the audience reaction to this one, and I’m pretty happy with how it all turned out!
So, there’s this thing at the College of William and Mary (where I went to school) that a bunch of us do every year called 24 Speed, where teams of students and alumni race the clock to shoot a short film in under 24 hours. It’s wild, it’s weird, it’s a ton of fun, it tends to encourage stupid creativity in the best of ways.
This year, the prompts were A Frog, the line of dialogue “Regret, what a funny word”, and our team was assigned ‘Oscar Bait’ and ‘Experimental’ as our genres to play with.
Roughly 24 hours later, we’d come up with and exported this:
The timeline of Golden, edited in Final Cut Pro X
For GOLDEN, most of the imagery was created with a few different AI image generators like Midjourney and Bing Image Creator, with assistance from Adobe Photoshop’s Generative fill.
The different models have different strengths and weaknesses, with Bing Image Creator being particularly good at logos, like Poison Arrow Softworks:
Some of the draft generations to get to the Poison Arrow Softworks Logo.
An alternate logo for Poison Arrow Softworks created with Bing Image Creator
The final logo for POISON ARROW SOFTWORKS
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And the Artificial Intelligence Golden Boy:
Alternates for the Golden Boy (TM) Logo created by Bing Image Creator
The final Golden Boy Logo
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Meanwhile Midjourney is better for creating settings, backdrops, and characters (like Deepfake DiCaprio):
A selection of Deepfake Dicaprios
Server rooms to slap the Poison Arrow Softworks logo onto.
The Los Angeles skyline at twilight, as perceived by Midjourney
That same Skyline but toasty.
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With Photoshop’s new generative fill feature, I can quickly select the subject in an image, move them to a new layer, then fill in the space they occupied with an extension of the background.
This let me keyframe each element at a different rate, to give more a sense of the illusion of motion and parallax effect.
So now this still image becomes two separate elements…
…a png of the host with a transparent background…
…and the background itself, with no host.
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I’ve also found that Midjourney is really good at coming up with gonzo concepts based on text descriptions. While I was working on writing the original script for Golden, and bouncing around ideas for what ‘Oscar Bait’ could mean, one of my thoughts was baiting a giant Oscar statue that was rampaging through the streets of downtown LA. Putting a few prompts into Midjourney, I got some real weird images of a giant golden head smashing through buildings, which inspired the ending of the movie.
Oscar awakens…
And the Academy Award for apocalyptic destruction goes to…
We don’t need no water…
Now THAT’S a boulevard of broken dreams.
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To animate the city being on fire for the last couple of shots, I used a new AI tool called Pika to take some of the stills Midjourney had created and turn them into videos.
A lot of things get set on fire by the end of this story. This tends to happen in the stuff I write.
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Like most AI tools, it involves a lot of trial and error, with an occasional side serving of unintentional nightmare fuel when I tried to animate the two deepfake actors (and to spare the audience, I decided to just to just keyframe those stills instead).
Oh good, I think the Acid tab just kicked in.
FOR THE LOVE OF ONES AND ZEROES WHYYYYY?!!
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It’s wild how these tools can output so much material so quickly. As an indie filmmaker working against the clock, on a timed film competition like this, it’s awesome. In less than 24 hours, I was able to produce multiple variants for every asset I could possibly want, and customize them to my liking through multiple variations.
One of the lines I’ve heard about tools like Midjourney is that it turns basically anyone into an Art Director, curating pieces to create a specific look and feel. And I’ve definitely found that they’ve helped me as a writer and filmmaker by allowing me to visualize story concepts that I may have a more ambiguous grasp on. As a person who likes to make stuff, particularly high-concept, low-budget sci-fi stuff, I’m thrilled (Look, I made this, with my computer!)
But I’m also rather wary of what kinds of effects tools like these will have on the filmmaking industry as large companies try to use them to replace jobs, and disrupt what had previously been good creative careers.
These tools are only capable of doing what they do because of the collected efforts of millions of artists that made the works these AI models and image generators were trained on, and the idea that they might be used to put those same artists out of a job is horrifying. Personally, having thought about this a bit, I don’t think we should be able to trademark or copyright anything produced with Generative AI like Midjourney or Bing Image Creator, unless the contributors to the training data were fairly compensated (which is a whole can of worms in and of itself). If anything, these outputs should be in the public domain, available to all, but owned by no-one.
There’s a lot to unpack here, something I’m hoping to get to in another blog entry soon, but for now, I hope this has been an informative window into some of the themes and process of Golden, and an exploration of some of the big ideas behind this (honestly kinda dumb) little short.
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