Contributed 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 live-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 onto competition nationally and then internationally.

The 24 Hour Film Race takes place on the exact same date (Eastern Time) for all teams. Over 750 teams around the world are challenged to create an original short film (4 minutes max) in just 24 hours based on a theme (one), action (listening to music), and prop (the number one).

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.

Afterword

There  it is, our guide with the key points of each race. Here is what each of the organizers had to say:

Cathleen Dean, Organizer, 48 Hour Film Festival

“What is most gratifying about the 48 Hour Film project is that it is a festival that not only challenges and inspires local filmmakers to conceive, create and complete a film in 48 hours but the festival goes on to screen and celebrate those filmmakers and their work. We are totally dedicated to advancing filmmaking and promoting our local film community. Not too many festivals can say that.”

Christy McCouch, Organizer, 24 Hour Film Race

“The producers in each city are often not contacted with dates and details until a month or two (sometimes even less). I tried to find a wide variety of judges this year that included people from all aspects of the industry. Once the judges have been picked and the race is complete, we wait for the films to be uploaded and for an official judging scoring sheet to be sent from the Competition Director. The judges have a couple of weeks to watch all of the films and score them in four categories: ‘Production Value’, ‘How The Story Is Told’, ‘Acting’ and ‘Story’. They also nominate the films for 14 ‘Best Of’ categories (from directing to special effects to makeup).”

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