Hey everyone, I posted about this competition earlier on to see if anyone from here was entered into it. I got no replies, but after completing the competition over the weekend (November 12th-13th) and sort of recovering, I've decided to post my experiences.

*Bear in mind, this was my first competition of this sort, never having such time restrictions such as these.

Friday Night: It was all preparation to make sure my 7 person team was able to get downtown and would be ready for the next day. It was decided that we would take the GO train and if need be, come back and use cars. All rides were arranged to the GO station by about 3 am Saturday morning. We had to be there for 7 50 am.

Saturday:

7:00 AM-I wake up to my cell phone ringing and it's one of my team members saying they did not have a ride to the GO station. This girl is crucial to my movie, and I needed to get her there. I didn't want my team to fall apart before the competition even started. I told her I would get her a ride there. Another member of my team called soon after, but fortunatley he lives a couple houses down from the first person who called. I arranged for him to be picked up as well and went to get breakfast and take a quick shower.

7:30 AM-I get out of the shower, to receive yet another phone call. It's ANOTHER member without a ride. At this point, I was seriously considering whether or not the world was conspiring against me. Anyway another ride was arranged. If you're wondering why I just didn't pick them up myself, it was only because they lived in the other direction of the station.

7:50 AM-I get to the GO station and 3 other members of my team (Andy, Paul and Tawni) are there. We're still waiting for Lori, John, Ashleigh and Matt. Half my team is missing and the train is to leave in 10 minutes. The clock's ticking and we have to be there to sign in at 9:15 AM.

7:58 AM-I tell the team members that are there to go ahead without me, and gave them directions to where we had to sign in and all the forms needed. I had bought a ticket, but I had to wait for the remainder of the team. At 8:00 exactly I see them running towards the train, but whatdya know? The train leaves lol. So, at least they didn't buy their tickets and we decide to drive downtown.

8:45 AM-We meet up with the remainder of the team and go to the place we had to sign in. We signed in at around 9:15 and waited about 45 minutes for the competition to start. We were the youngest team there, ranging from 17-18. This perturbed some of the team, but I calmed them down.

10:00 AM-The challenge starts and we receive our "challenge pack" in a bag. We now have 24 hours to complete and submit our movie. I directed the team to a restaurant where we decided to eat and write our script.

10:30 AM-The food is ordered and we've opened the challenge pack. Our genre is "the end of the world", we have a prop that is a little starlight thing (a little hard to explain, but very stupid prop), a phrase "What Now?" and our theme was "a suprise twist". Writing, planning, discussing and arguing took longer than expected and we didn't end up leaving the restaurant until around 2.

2:00 PM-We first decided to shoot our outdoor shots in case it got dark. Those were well done and after traveling, etc it took us about an hour to film it.

3:00 PM-It was off to Union Station after that and we had finally set up our equipment and were ready to shoot when we were confronted by a security guard demanding a permit. Of course, I didn't have a permit, nor had I thought in advance about it. We were forced to leave.

3:45 PM-We then decide to film elsewhere, and it was pretty frantic but we got the scene done. This was where we ran into a bit of a problem...My team brought it to my attention that without the scenes from Union, our movie couldn't follow the script and we had to think fast of how we were going to change it.

4:00 PM-We sat and argued for about an hour of what we were to do. Once the arguing was done and the scene was decided we started to set up once again, in the place we were sitting the whole time.

5:00 PM-At this point, a security guard chooses to show up and ask us what we're doing. I explained to him and he seemed interested. At first I thought he was going to kick us out again and nobody was in any mood for that to happen. He told us we could shoot the scene, but not to stay for too much longer. He also advised me to make sure that I had a permit next time or at least ask the permission of the mall manager.

6:00 PM-The scene is finally done and we get out of there, deciding that we will film the rest back at home. On our way; walking the streets of Toronto though, we notice a great tunnel that would be perfect for one of our scenes. We stopped to film, getting what was probably the best scene of the whole movie.

6:45 PM-We leave Toronto and are on our way back. It is decided that we are to go to my house to edit the footage.

8:00 PM-We're sitting in my basement and decided to look over the footage before we start to edit. It's then discovered that some scenes filmed with the make shift boom mic did NOT have audio. Some of those scenes were especially crucial and we had no audio whatsoever. I was exasperated. There was no time to refilm these scenes, nor were we downtown to film them again.

9:00 PM-We start to go over the footage again to see what sort of plot we could develop out of the footage we had. Matt said he'd be able to put together something with editing as he had been filming random shots downtown. Not necessarily the scenes we needed, but background noise for some audio.

10:00 PM-It's finally decided that Matt will start editing and we filmed a couple more scenes to fill in with the plot we had tried to develop.

11:00 PM-Pizza arrives and we finish it in like 5 minutes. 2 members of the team go home after this and the editing begins.

Sunday Morning:

12:00 AM-5:00 AM-Girls pass out, Matt continues editing. We film one or two more scenes and we're getting tired. Matt gives up editing and Paul and I are suprised at how much he's done. He basically salvaged our entry. It's decent and not horrible but needs tweaking.

5:00 AM-I take over editing and we decide we need background music. We find copyright free music and we overlayed it, and now it's sounding and looking a lot better. We're impressed. We do some more editing, but it takes longer than expected because of the level of tiredness.

6:30 AM-We wake Ashleigh up for one final scene and she does it and we go back to editing.

7:45 AM-Things are almost done, but editing was taking longer than expected. At this point we only have 2 hours and 15 minutes to get it in.

8:30 AM-We finally think we're done and we attempt to export it back to the DV tape. This is where we run into a problem. I can't seem to figure out how to. Also Premiere isn't recognizing my camera anymore This isn't looking good and we don't know what to do.

9:00 AM-Matt suggests we render it as an .avi file and export it back to the camcorder with Windows Movie Maker. Running low on time I said sure and I rendered the movie. Started exporting with WMM and it stops at 3 minutes. I found out that it didn't render the other 1 minute and 15 seconds. Stupid Premiere. Now time is wasting and I'm stuck again.

9:20 AM-Finally Matt again, comes to the rescue in suggesting that we render from the scene that screwed up to the end. Only that section. So he rewound the tape back to just before the scene, in the middle of the transition and I rendered from the beginning of the scene that screwed up. Then I transferred it to the tape, hoping that it would just continue...flow as if it hadn't been two seperate parts. I didn't have time to check and it was time to go. I forgot to rewind the tape and I got in the car to go.

9:35 AM-We leave my house and now have 25 minutes to get downtown and hand the video in. It was a helluva race to the finish. We got on the street around 9:55 and were a few blocks from the drop off spot. We see the store, but can't stop and go a couple blocks more. When the car stops it's 9:59 and I ran up the street to hand it in. I got there and the girl there is like you're 30 seconds late! but quick, put it in the drop box. I put it in and breathed a sigh of relief.

From the sounds of it, we got it in on time, or close enough to still be judged. I'm a little worried, but I think that since I got it IN the dropbox it will be judged. After all our location problems, technical difficulties, editing difficulties and disputes we still managed to pull it off in the 24 hours. For that we were proud. The screening is this Friday and we'll be there. Our film will probably pale in comparison to the others shown there, but as said before it was our first competition and from it we learned a lot. Next time, we'll be much better prepared and will destroy the competition.

-Kegan

Holy crap. Sounds like it was a helluva day. Glad you pulled it off in time.