SCI-FI London 48hr Challenge

Last weekend we took part in SCI-FI London’s 48hr film challenge in collaboration with StudioLAX. The competition had over 300 teams register with 161 films being completed before the deadline. The task is to be given a random film title, prop and line of dialogue Saturday morning and to devise, shoot and edit a 5min Sci-Fi film to be handed in on Monday morning. You can see exactly what we got on our title card below.

We initally threw around a few different ideas before all agreeing on a few things. We wanted to make a film unlike any of the other entries seen previously. Very few films entered in previous competitions had any humour and most took a very serious approach to the Sci-Fi genre, so early on we decided to create something with dark, dry humour running throughout. We also noticed the huge amount of ‘post-apocalyptic’ entries and wanted to poke a bit of fun at that specific genre.

 
Our fantastic cast included Dennis Hewitt, Jack Robertson and Amy Telford. We also had a great make-up/props team on-board with Imaginative Minds.
 

 
We spent the first day coming up with an idea and a rough script. We also shot all of the scenes that wouldn’t be taking place in our main location, Cateran hole on Saturday.

 
Cateran hole is a location our sound guy had visited a few times while walking his dog. An old unmarked, smugglers cave out in the countryside. Nobody else had ever visited it amongst the crew and in my head I assumed it would be quite spacious to film inside, how wrong I was! The ‘cave’ is more like a corridor, heading about 45m underground. Den was a great sport and I think spent at least around 5 hours underground, he got pretty comfy down there.

 
Luckily we had our Canon 5D on a very small rig with a 312 Bi-Colour LED panel mounted on-top. Our original idea was to light the cave naturally using only candles, lanterns and torches. It lit people’s faces but didn’t really show off the cave too much so we ended up sticking the LED panel on 3200K to mimic the orange candle light which I think worked quite well.

 
Apparently SCI-FI London prefer the entries not to be uploaded to the public before the short-list is announced so we are following their orders! We’ll make the final video public in about a weeks time. We had so much fun making this short and staying up till 7am Monday morning didn’t seem like much of a chore although I think we all went a little delirious towards the end. Great fun and look forward to entering again next year!