For those who don't know The 48 Hour Film Challenge is a phenomenon that occurs around the country. Teams gather together and strive to make the best short possible in just 2 days. Each team is assigned a genre and there's a prop and line of dialogue that everyone has to work (need I add seamlessly) into their piece. It's fun, crazy, creative and intense and the resulting works are always fun to watch. This year the Harvard Square Scriptwriters sponsored a team and it was a great experience for all who participated.

I asked the producer, Andrew Hall, to send me his notes immediately ASAP after the film was completed. He did - and below are his unedited notes.

The shoot well. The genre was Sci-Fi (yay!) our prop was a reciept, and our line of dialogue was, "this could get complicated".

I was able to punch out a rough draft in two hours and emailed it out to the other writers. We met at a Panera at 6:30 AM and went over the draft. I went over to Lauren Sigel's house (where we shot most of the scenes) and punched out another draft. We had another meeting and punched out another draft. Three actors showed up (the other two were coming later) and we started shooting at 11AM. We had a half hour for lunch and went until a bit after 6PM.

We then had a break for 1.5 hours and then we went to our second location "Taste" a coffee shop in Newton. We shot from 8:30 until 10:30. We could've stayed another half hour to an hour but we had to leave.

I met up with Loren Miller the next day at 11:30AM. He had been up all night doing the edit. He showed it to me and we made a few changes. The film scorer from Berkely showed. There were technical issues going on but they were eventually overcome.

We got the film and requred paperwork in by 7:15PM. Fifteen minutes to spare. {Editor's Note: The folks at 48 noted that this was group was the 1st ever to have all teams turn in their films on time]

The piece is: Faust meets Donnie Darko.

The name: Black Hole

Not a laughfest.

The whole cast and crew were great. It was frak'n incredible.

Andy