How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the 48 Hour Deadline

Short Film Paralysis™ is an all-too-common affliction. Putting money into a short film is a lot like throwing money into a tornado: with some incredible luck maybe the winds will float a tenner back to you but I wouldn’t count on it as an investment strategy. As such, the pressure on making any short film is massive: is it really worth spending weeks, potentially months of your life, pouring in your payslips and living off Pot Noodles to make a short that faces (let’s be honest) slim chances of breakout success?

When you weigh it like that, it’s incredibly easy to drop any given script. You constantly search for a better idea, something smaller, something more original, something that won’t break the bank. Then before you know it, a year has passed and nothing’s been made.

This past weekend, a film school friend of mine, Director Extraordinaire Tom Chambers, called me up asking me to be the Cinematographer on a 48-Hour Filmmaking Challenge he was directing. At first, to be honest, I was pretty reticent. I’m not a Cinematographer, for one, but also frankly it had been a long week at work, and I wasn’t feeling up to losing my weekend to an exhausting exercise.

But the fact is I’d been stewing in the discomfort of not having helmed a narrative project for a while. I wanted to break the spell, so, yes, I said, count me in.

Tom Chambers (left), Ruari Chambers (right) and myself, setting up the opening shot of our film The Autograph.

After much deliberation on that first night we settled on our story: the fast-paced odyssey of a vain fraud, who in his desperation to impress a date has his friend stage an autograph-signing. Half-planned and half-improvised, it turned out well! Not perfect, but its fast pace and variety of locations help it break free of the claustrophobia that often encases projects for these challenges.

Tom Chambers (left) directs Youssef Mekawi (right) while I line up a shot.

Moreover though, the challenge itself is something I find a worthwhile exercise for artists, and filmmakers especially.

Short-term challenges like this take the pressure of that paralysis off, there are no expectations of high production value, perfect lighting or precise editing as the timing precludes these luxuries. It’s exercise. Much like when a roommate drags you to the gym for the first time in months, don’t expect to hit your personal best, but you’ll feel damn good after. And maybe it’ll get you back in the habit.

Youssef Mewaki (right) and Lucy Hallet-Jones (left) behind the scenes at a rooftop party sequence.

This filmmaking race of sorts is something I haven’t done since even before film school. My film school’s course grew more and more complex as it progressed, piling on more gear, bigger budgets, studio builds and better cameras. The reasoning is clear, but it also engenders this sense that every project you work on thereafter has to be larger in scope, more refined than the last. Once you get a taste of production value it can be hard to go back to the scrappier run-and-gun methods of shooting without it feeling like a regression.

If you have the discipline to self-impose this kind of challenge, go for it. Otherwise I’d highly recommend seeking out and entering dedicated competitions like this for any kind of artist. A deadline imposed by an outside force, one that you must meet no matter what, is exactly the kind of spur needed to prick the sides of action. Even Tom was brought into the challenge by our lead actor, Youssef Mekawi, reaching out and urging him to take part.

The project grew out of a need to create something for the competition. Had this script existed independent of the challenge, with a view to shoot in a few weeks’ time, it would no doubt have been endlessly nitpicked and tinkered with until possibly fizzling out entirely.

However, the weekend passed anyway, as it always does, and now a short film exists where none did just a couple of days before.