Clean (Fortress Productions, copyright 2007)

This past weekend, for the second time in as many years, I was privileged enough to be a part of the 48 Hour Film Festival. There were 48 teams in Baltimore this year competing to put together the best short film humanly (and technologically) possible in a two-day period, so you can imagine it is a chaotic sort of thing.

At 7pm on Friday evening we learned that the genre we had to work with was Detective/Cop, and that we had to somehow work in a house painter, a character named either Glen or Glenda, a flag, and a specific line of dialogue: “I can’t remember everything.”

Having gathered at the Tress residence in Enola, PA with a group of very talented people (who are also a blast to be around), we collaborated on the story until after 4am, with our best ideas coming sometime after 3 when normal inhibitions get swept away due to sleep deprivation and copious amounts of caffeine. After about an hour of sleep it was time to wake up and get back to work.

We spent most of Saturday filming, between a farm house somewhere in the countryside in the general vicinity of Harrisburg, an old movie theatre in New Cumberland built in 1939, and then Porter’s Furniture in Lancaster, which is this fascinating multi-level warehouse that I highly recommend if you are in the market for, say, an antique refrigerator, a bird cage, a cigar store Indian, a Route 462 sign, or an incubator for a human baby with breathing problems.

Saturday evening until Sunday afternoon, for those left standing, entailed a whole slew of editing, as well as some last-minute filming, and the composition of an original score to accompany the film.

Tomorrow the film will screen at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the winners will be announced sometime in the next few weeks.

If you’re interested in checking out the film we did for last year’s festival, click here.