Huzzah! Turned in our completed film “The Box” late last night, with just 30 minutes to spare!

The 48 Hour Film Project is a maddening challenge to conceptualize, write, film, edit and deliver a short film in, well, 48 hours. No paid actors, no stock footage or music, only original screenplays; everything must be created by you. And… they assign you genre, character, a prop, and a line of dialogue, all of which must be in the movie.

Our team, Fabulous Monk Pictures, drew “Time Travel” as our genre. My friend and outstanding eco-photographer Jerry Monkman, did the cinematography and co-directed, while I co-directed, edited, and wrote the screenplay. (I also narrated the thing, but I’ve been hesitant to take credit for that; if you watch the film, you’ll understand why).

The kickoff on Friday night was a lot of fun, spent eating and drinking until late at The Friendly Toast, brainstorming story ideas. (Unfortunately, I came home at 1:30am to find that my wife had accidentally locked me out of the house. And was wearing earplugs so she couldn’t hear me knocking/cursing. Scraping off serious amounts of skin, I DID manage to squeeze in through a tiny basement window; it’s all healing nicely so that’s good. ‘Nuff said.)

Saturday. Yow. Let’s just say that this was a frustrating day for everyone. To begin with, it was raining. Then, we ran into the “too many cooks” syndrome and didn’t start shooting until…3pm.

Cut to seven hours later. All spent on one room. If you’re picturing a grim, disgruntled, possibly homicidal crew, you’re not far off.

We had what we thought was about a minute’s worth of usable footage. Morale was low. One volunteer had fled. It was our Come To Jesus moment. And… we threw in the towel.

The next day, I was reviewing the footage just to see what might have been and it slowly started to hit me… with some slight modifications to the script, we actually had enough footage to meet the four minute minimum requirement! I hastily rewrote the script, pulled in Jerry, narrated the thing, rendered it, and we drove like madmen to the dropoff.

It’s going to be shown in all it’s glory on the big screen tomorrow night, June 15th, at 9pm here.

It was a helluva ride, and I’m proud of our little production team.