Sidewalk Scramble 2017: A Lesson in Time Management
Do you ever back yourself into a corner just so you’ll actually have to get something done? I decided to use a whole weekend doing just this to make a short film with my friends for Sidewalk Scramble.
What is Sidewalk Scramble?
Sidewalk Scramble is a filmmaking competition held by Sidewalk Fest. Each team that competes has to create a short film within 48 hours. Each Scramble has some sort of guidelines — this year’s required each team to draw two themes or genres out of a hat. (If you want to learn more, visit Sidewalk’s website here.)
Oh cool! …What is Sidewalk Fest?
Sidewalk Fest is a film festival in Birmingham, Alabama held by the Alabama Moving Image Association (AMIA). AMIA is a non-profit organization that produces film festivals and encourages filmmaking in Alabama. (You can learn more about Sidewalk here.)
My experience
I worked on a core team of 3 people: myself, my friend Drew Tanner, who recently graduated from University of Alabama, and Camille Goulet, a wonderful photography student at UAB (and high school friend). Our friends Michael Webb and Noah Duffy (a Theatre student at UAB) helped out as our actors, and my friend and fellow co-worker at UAB Digital Media Kenzie Greer came out to help with our shoots Saturday.
I was excited to get to work when I met up with Drew on Friday. We walked to The Abbey, a local coffee shop, that evening to get our prompts. This year, each team would draw two themes out of a hat that their films would have to meet. While Drew filled out paperwork, I closed my eyes and drew “A case of mistaken identity” and “action.” Immediately I look at Drew to gauge his reaction. Neither of us expected to make an action film, but we didn’t freak out. We contacted Camille and let her know what we were assigned, then all of us met up at my apartment.
Our ideal plan was to write and storyboard the short Friday night, shoot and log footage Saturday, then edit the film Sunday and turn it in Sunday evening. We met up to brainstorm and write our script around 8 Friday night, and by 1 am, we still had nothing. Our ideas got weird. We decided to to come back at it with fresh minds the next morning, but all of us were worried.
Thankfully, Drew had a moment of inspiration while in the shower the next morning, and at that point we were all ready to run with an idea whether it was good or not. (Drew’s idea was good though, I promise!) We met up with Michael (our protagonist) around 9:30 a.m. and started to prepare for our shoots.
The short had three main settings; a park and two separate apartments. We started shooting at 11 a.m. at Camille’s apartment. There were a few scenes here, and shooting took us about four and a half hours.
We rushed over to a park near us at 4pm to get our scenes with our other actor, Noah, recorded. It took us about an hour to set up and record the scene at the park. Around 5 we moved over to my apartment, only a few blocks away. By this time, everyone could see we were close to the end and we had to keep each other from getting too distracted.
We finished shooting around 7 p.m. As I heard the words “That’s a wrap!” a wave of relief washed over me. I occupied my last 24 hours solely with this short film, and now I had a slight break.
I should not have taken that break.
I didn’t start to work on organizing our footage until around 10 a.m. Sunday. This involved organizing and naming files on the hard drive, importing them to Premiere (my preferred video editing software at the moment), marking them, creating multi-camera sequences where needed, and organizing shots and sequences by scene and take. While it may not feel like you’re taking up too much time, organizing files can take forever.
I didn’t start on the rough edit until noon, and our project was due at 6 p.m. It took me (and Drew) about 3 and a half hours to get a cut laid out, and from there we had to fix our audio, color correct and score the film.
At 5:15 p.m., Drew was hard at work trying to level and mix the audio for the film while I had given up on color correction in order to start on a score for the film. It took 15 more minutes for us both to just accept what we had so we could export it in time to turn it in. It took 30 minutes for us to export a five minute short film. As soon we had a video file on my hard drive, we drove over to the coffee shop where the competition began so we could turn it in.
This weekend was a rush.
What Was Great
- This was my first experience with fiction filmmaking. Up to this point I have mostly worked on interview based videos, and working on a short film has sparked a new interest for me.
- There was definitely an emotional high after a day of shooting. If you like the immense feeling of satisfaction and you’re willing to risk losing your mind for a couple of days, then you should join the competition next year.
- I now have some great shots for my showreel! (Time for me to show off)
What Was Not
- I had 48 hours. My work did not stop with the end of shooting. But I acted like it did. While we got our film turned in on time, we would have had more time to review it if we’d been more diligent with our work schedule.
- Co-editing. I get mean. Especially when I know time isn’t on my side. Thankfully, Drew has done this before and has thick skin when it comes to getting a film finished, so he was not affected by my attitude.
- Obsessing over what I could have done better. Learning from your mistakes is great; it’s what you should do. But I have to keep in mind that we had only 48 hours to write, shoot and edit this. Of course there’s flaws in it.
What I Learned
- Take time to organize your shoots. Make sure everyone’s using the same camera settings, or the camera settings assigned to their shots. Know what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, and be aware of everyone else on set. Preparing in the front half will save you in the back half.
- Set roles ahead of time. While working on small productions like this means you’ll have to do a bit of everything, it’s important to have primary roles for everyone so no one steps on each other’s toes. On the other hand, don’t be afraid to ask for help if you need it!
- Don’t underestimate the time it takes for you to finish something. I took a break Saturday night once we finished shooting, and I should have gone ahead and at least organized our footage, because that took a couple of hours that I could have used to edit the next day.
The Sidewalk Scramble 2017 Screening happens in March.
