V48HOURS: PLOVER

One thing leads to another, and a chance meeting last year at Christopher Vogler's Writer's Journey workshop at Park Road Post led to new friends and an invitation to join a filmmaking team for this year's V48HOURS Furious Filmmaking competition.

V48HOURS is something of a tradition here in New Zealand. Hundreds of teams around the country submit themselves to the opportunity to create a short film in the span of a single weekend. You don't know until 7 pm Friday evening the parameters that will shape your film. At that time you're handed a genre, a character name and characteristic, a line of dialogue, and a prop. Our prospective locations, theoretically suitable for multiple genres, had been secured over the previous month by producer Carlos Ramirez Laloli and director Dan Lynch. Would we get Western, Musical, Biopic?

My writing partner, Jacob Rosevear, and I worked on the script through the night, turning it over to the production team around 7:30 Saturday morning. After feedback and a quick rewrite, the team was off and running. Afterwards I was, as the Kiwis say, shattered. I managed 90 minutes of sleep and then went to the set. Jacob, God bless him, didn't sleep at all, filming until 9 pm Saturday night.

The cast and crew were terrific. We were all running flat out, and I wondered if our compressed production was anything like the final days (months?) of a major production. Sadly, technical issues prevented our film from competing, but it was still screened a couple days later at the Reading Courtenay Cinema - a big thrill to see our work on the big screen. Enjoy!


Plover - Team CineTrance (2011) from Daniel Lynch on Vimeo.