By Todd Longwell

Cinemasports filmmakers in Dolores Park, S.F. PHOTO: TODD LONGWELL.

One secret to successfully completing an indie film is to finish it before you run out of money, use up your favors, alienate your friends/crew and lose the creative spark that ignited your passion for the project. Now at events across the country like the 48 Hour Film Project (www.48hourfilm.com) and Cinemasports (www.cinemasports.com), filmmakers are taking that idea to its not-so-logical conclusion and compressing the entire production process from conception to completion down to two days or less, starting the weekend with a video camera and raw stock and going back to work on Monday with a finished short under their belts.

“I had always wanted to do a short film, but I never wanted to be one of those stories — ‘Okay, this weekend we’ve got my mom’s boathouse, so we’re going to shoot that one scene, and then if you guys are all available the next weekend…’” says Richard Sampson, the Atlanta-based producer behind award-winning 48 Hour Film Project shorts White Bitch Down and Moved. “It’s the story of films that never get made. So cranking it out in 48 hours was perfect.”

Technology makes it possible. Three-chip Mini DV cameras can be had for under $1000, and Windows XP and Macintosh operating systems come bundled with the programs Movie Maker and iMovie, respectively, which enable users to capture and edit video and burn DVDs.

Cinemasports is billed as “the Iron Chef of filmmaking,” but it’s more akin to a communal cinematic inkblot test. In the morning, teams of amateur filmmakers gather at a predetermined location and are given a single set of ingredients (e.g. an onion, an English teacher and a tattoo parlor) that must be included in each of their individual films of four minutes or less. They then disperse to formulate, film and edit their respective shorts, reassembling that evening for a public screening of the finished product. Oftentimes participants show up alone and form teams with complete strangers.

48 Hour Film Project�participant John Hill on the set of White Bitch Down. PHOTO: TIM VASILOVIC.

[The time constraint] “is difficult, but it’s very freeing during the writing and production phases, because you don’t have enough time to agonize over every line,” says Mark Ruppert, 42, who co-founded the 48 Hour Film Project with Liz Langston in Washington D.C. in May 2001. “You’ve got to move forward.”

Some films, like those of Sampson (a veteran TV commercial producer with experienced collaborators and professional equipment), are surprisingly polished. But if these weekend wonders tend to be less than fully realized artistic statements, that’s okay. According to Jin Joo, the 31-year-old Web developer who launched the San Francisco–based Cinemasports in September 2003, emphasizes the process is as important as the product.

“I think it’s as good as going to film school,” he says. “You see how your film turns out, and you get a lot of feedback. It’s only a day. Maybe you could have made it better in some ways, but you made certain decisions and you can see the direct results of those decisions and adjust your goal for next time.”

Ruppert estimates that this year alone there will be upwards of 600 teams participating in 48 Hour Film Project events around the globe, from Los Angeles to New Zealand, and similar events (the 48 Hour Film Challenge, the 48 Hour Film Festival, etc.) are popping up like mushrooms.

“I really think that it’s a social movement,” proclaims Joo, whose has also staged Cinemasports events in London and Vancouver. “It’s really challenging old ideas about how to correctly make a movie — how many people you need, how long it takes. They’re not Hollywood productions, but in the end, it’s an ultra-simple way for people to get a movie out there.”