i48

Middle schoolers have invaded our house! :) We just had so much fun helping out with Josh's i48 team!

I case you missed my last post, i48 is a 48 hour film festival they do here. It's for teens and adults and they get together in teams and are given a theme and each team has 48 hours to write, film, edit and submit a movie, which will be shown at a film festival next weekend. Josh's filmmaking teacher put a team together and we volunteered to help out.

Last night at 6pm the team was given the packet with their theme and information and they met over here to start writing a script. It was nine kids and Josh's filmmaking teacher in our dining room. We supplied enough snacks and drinks to keep them happy for hours while they worked.

The theme they were given was Sci-Fi and they were also given a few other rules to make things fun. Things like they were assigned a specific name for a character, they had to use a certain phrase somewhere in the movie and they were given a prop that had to be featured somewhere.

So at six o'clock last night they got to work writing a script. They were supposed to be here until 10 but it went on until 11. It was fun to watch the process and by the end they were hyped up on sugar and caffeine and the excitement of the process and it was really fun.

They needed some house scenes for the script so this morning they came back over at 8:30 and started filming in our house. It was kind of a madhouse in here with people all over the place and digging around the house for props and coming up with different ideas. It was really fun and I enjoyed being able to help them a bit.

By 11:30 they had gotten all the house scenes and the rest of it was filmed at the school, so we packed everyone up and drove them over to the school. It's now almost 5:30 and Josh just called and said that they're done filming. One of the other kids is editing it tonight and it will be turned in tomorrow. It was a whirlwind of a weekend but so much fun! The kids really seemed to be having a great time and I think it was a fun learning experience for them.

Unfortunately the films will be shown next weekend and we aren't going to be here because we're taking our Fathers Day trip to the mountains. I didn't realized that the festival was next weekend when I made our plans. Kind of a bummer, but Josh had fun making the movie anyway. I have a feeling that it's pretty tough competition, so winning might be a long shot, but it would be fun to go see all the movies.

So that's what we did this weekend. It was actually really fun. We're all about film festivals this year! :)