48 Hour Film Project, 2010 – “Minus Cowboy”

The 48 Hour Film Project is a wild and sleepless weekend in which you and a team make a movie—write, shoot, edit and score it—in just 48 hours. On Friday night, you get a character, a prop, a line of dialogue and a genre, all to include in your movie. 48 hours later, the movie must be complete. Then it will show at a local theater, usually in the next week.

First, I have to thank Kelly Tippens of Kelly Casting for putting me in touch with the great Wicker-Hu team. I got the call on Thursday afternoon that the crew was still looking for a few actors. After short conversation with JR Wicker, I was officially signed on to my first 48 Hour project.

Call time was 9:30pm on Friday. First stop: Command HQ, or rather a nice apartment rented by some of the team members. When I arrived, there was plenty of activity going on as operations, logistics, and planning overlapped wardrobe selection, team member introductions, and draft revisions. A quick read through with a couple of the others actors and JR cast me as the “Cowboy” of the film’s title.

At the start of the weekend — 6pm Friday — each team draws their film’s genre from a hat. Wicker-Hu pulled “Western”. Oh boy. Plenty of deserts, old town saloons, and horses to be sourced in downtown Atlanta. Anyway, by 9:30, we had a script.

By 10:30 we were heading to our first location, So Ba Vietnamese Restaurant in East Atlanta. This is where the meat of the film takes place: an unusual interaction between the Cowboy and his old high school principal. 12 hours later we wrapped the location and took a two hour break.

Saturday afternoon we took advantage of the mildly overcast day to shoot outside scenes, mostly of the Cowboy wandering around and running into interesting characters.

By 11pm on Saturday, we had arrived at the final location, Jai Shanti yoga studio, to capture just a few more scenes. Thankfully one of these included a bed, so all I had to do was lie there with my eyes closed. At that point, it was about all I could do.

I wrapped at 3:30am, Sunday morning. Now, everything was in the hands of the editors.