Making a Short Film in 48 Hours

This vlog documents my experience while shooting a short film over a weekend. It was a pretty wild roller coaster ride. Even if you have all the experience in the world, shooting a short film in 48 hours requires tenacity, grit, and the ability to continue pushing with very little sleep.

It’s been my experience that your scheduled shoot days are pretty much guaranteed to go well into the night and into the early morning. Luckily, this particular shoot wasn’t for a film race competition. We just had to shoot a pre-written script within a weekend.

I’ve only done one or two other 48 hour film races in my life, and the beginning is always fun, the shooting is also pretty fun, but toward the end of the shoot, everyone starts to fade, and if your film requires any fancy editing tricks or VFX, that’s almost always the most difficult part because it comes last.

Everyone is always dog-tired at the end of the race, and that makes editing (the one piece of production, I’d argue, requires the largest amount of continuous, logical thought) the hardest step of all. You’ve done all this work and killed yourself to reach the end and you’re only one final, rendered timeline away from submitting! But it’s always a great overall experience. Keep creating.