By Indie Film Club Miami

If you wanted to challenge yourself to a marathon-like experience as a filmmaker, the 48-hour film festival must be it. As the name implies, you conceive, shoot, edit and deliver a short film in not a second over 48 hours. This is the best cure for the procrastinating filmmaker, you have  a movie in a weekend.  So when the contest happened two weeks ago, we decided, there is no better or more productive way to spend a sleepless weekend.

But wait, on the same weekend there was an even crazier notion, the 24-hour film race. Yes, the same challenges as above but you deliver in 24-hours. Known fact is that all filmmakers are crazy and if the two challenges were happening on separate weekends, we would have gladly done the two. Sadly, it appeared that the 48-hour organizers moved their festival to the same weekend as the 24 Hour Film Race, so we had to pick one.

The experience was so great, we wanted to do another 48-hour fest immediately after, but another well known fact is that we have masochistic tendencies! The best part of the experience has to be the people. If you have a great team and they show talent, grace and humor through the grueling hours, then congratulations, you might have found your crew and cast for years to come! Also, gained some life-long friends. We loved our Super Mango Bros.

Introduction

The 48 Hour Film Project is a contest in which teams of filmmakers are assigned a genre (choices from horror to musical picked from a hat), a character (Repair man/woman Claude or Claudette Ramos), a prop (a wrapped package), and a line of dialogue (I can’t believe it).

This year 50,000 filmmakers will make over  4,000 films in 120 cities on 6 continents around the world.  Their smallest team has consisted of one person, their largest team to date was a team from Albuquerque with 116 people and 30 horses! The contest happens on different weekends in different cities throughout the year and the city finalists move on to competition nationally and then internationally.

Now that hopefully the best and most original shorts have won, we would like to give you an easy guide to the two races, attempting to make it efortless for you to pick one next year.