48HFP 2023 – Baltimore
TELEX – Showdown at Twisty Basket
Emre Yagci, Jaki Demarest, Khadija Mehter, Sami Boyd, David Richman, Staci Bee, Lucien Buddenbaum

Required character: Rick or Rita Pelepano, farmers market vendor.
Required line: “That’s not what I had in mind.”
Required prop: A pink thing.
Genres: Western and/or Social Media Influencer Film.

Synopsis:
Friends turned influencers duke it out at the Twisty Basket for social media supremacy and the ultimate prize: The Pink Thing.

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Leading up to 48HFP Baltimore I didn’t have time to assemble a team. As I was getting ready to make a Facebook post I got an email from Mark Ruppert, founder and organizer of 48HFP, with a list of volunteers without a team. I emailed them all and most joined. Turns out they’re all very talented and were great to work with.

Although I never liked the idea of working with a big team, I needed the experience of managing and coordinating folks first hand. We had a very diverse group, people from all different backgrounds, and nobody knew each other. Everyone had different schedules and availabilities so even the first Zoom meeting had to be repeated three times.

Several plans changed on kickoff Friday night: our shooting location and some substitutions on the writing team. Thankfully, our writer Jaki was a 48HFP veteran and knocked out a hilarious script in one sitting.

We finished filming at 5pm on Saturday, which is probably the earliest any 48HFP team has ever finished. With an entire 24+ hours left to edit, you would think it would be smooth sailing.

Storms / power outages
By 7pm I had made it home, but there was no electricity. “No problem” I thought and took a two hour nap. I woke up to electricity and began offloading footage. After the first couple steps, syncing footage, preparing project, organizing clips by color, deleting bad clips, and emailing team to ask for additional footage from their phones, the editing process started.

At 1:30am catastrophe stuck and power was lost again. I stayed put and used the many camera batteries and battery powered LED lights I had to organize my house and make the most of the time, expecting power to come back shortly.

An hour goes by and there’s still no power. I walk outside and follow the distant construction noises until I get to a major intersection with 6 Pepco trucks and 20 utility workers arguing about something under a power transformer. At this point I’m a little concerned, as power generally comes back within an hour when there’s an outage.

I walked back home and napped again, hoping to preserve my energy for the edit process, waking up every hour to see if power had come back. 9am comes around and there’s still no power.

At this point I’m in sheer panic as there is less than 10 hours to edit and submit a film, and I have to start the edit process from scratch. I fire up a 10 year old Macbook knowing it might not even be up to the task. Thankfully all the footage and proxy files were on an external SSD. I set up camp at a Dunkin Donuts where I would edit until power came back, then hopefully finish off the film at home. Power never came back and I ended up editing at Dunkin Donuts the entire day.

Although submitted on time, the result wasn’t great. Having lost 12 hours, there wasn’t enough time for the social media overlays I had planned, very little time for sound, and the Macbook wasn’t powerful enough to fix little annoyances like flicker in some of the slow motion shots. There was barely enough time to edit properly, and every click on the Macbook was delayed by a second or two because it was so slow.

The Pink Thing
Our “pink thing” was a mannequin head I had spray-painted pink a while back, with matching pink ear protection I found at a thrift. Worked well with our ending, as Lucien, the narrator, is revealed to be a podcaster wearing headphones, who wins the pink thing.

Final edit
It wasn’t until Tuesday after filmmaking weekend that I sat down to make the proper edit that everyone on the team was expecting. Would have been unfair to everyone to give up or leave the film as it was. Folks put a lot of effort into the process and we needed a good film. You can watch the proper edit here:

Poster
I made a couple different versions of the poster before settling on the design posted above. I thought this one was pretty funny, although several of my teammates weren’t super into it. The images of “hands holding phones” aren’t stock photos, they’re AI generated with Stable Diffusion.

Trailer
Having exhausted myself throughout this 48H, which for me was more like two-weeks, I kept the trailer simple.

BTS
One of the benefits of having a huge team is the sheer amount of BTS footage we captured. Officially, Sami was delegated to capturing BTS, which she did a fantastic job.

Final thoughts
Despite a catastrophic power outage and several other stressors, I’d say this was a great 48H. Working with a totally new group of people who didn’t know each other was a great experiment and yielded excellent results.

Experiencing a crippling power outage is also something worth learning from. It can happen to anyone at anytime, and having a backup plan is always smart. Luckily for me, my camera, the ZCam E2S6, automatically creates proxy files when shooting in certain modes. We we’re shooting in 6K ProRes, and the Macbook I had to edit on wasn’t going to be able to handle the footage. The proxies were 1280×720 ProRes – much easier for the laptop to work with, despite still being sluggish.

Social
Since our submission was weak, I felt it would be a smart move to use social media and keep the story alive somehow. We started a Twisty Basket Farmers Market Instagram account, and put up a website at twistybasket.com.

Social media overlays
These were pretty simple. An Instagram Live template was bought from some website, and plopped on top of phone footage recorded by the actors. I made up a bunch of comments and generated profile photos using Stable Diffusion. Entire process took about an hour for each actors social media overlay. We had also filmed a couple clips with Jaki and Staci holding onto the matte box of my camera, but it didn’t seem realistic enough.