48 Hour Film Project recap: Drones, beer, frenzy and Wonder Woman

The rush, the mental strain, the anguish — OK, the freaking panic — is a lot to go through to finish oh-so-close to first place but not win. Year after year after year.

But here once more are The Collective Brain, a gaggle of Indy area creative types, chasing down the cinematic dream in a two-day make-a-movie wind sprint known as the 48 Hour Film Project. The competition, hosted locally by the arts group Big Car Collaborative, pits filmmakers against one another as they try to win $5,000 as well as a shot at Hollywood and, potentially, Cannes.

Each team draws a genre, and then a prop, character and line of dialogue are assigned. From there the race is on: Conceive an idea, write a script, get costumes, identify a location, shoot, edit, score, sleep (maybe). All within 48 hours.

The competition began at 6 p.m. Friday, July 31. A team from The Star (@annemiaoli, @DennisBarbosa86 and @weihuanchen) is following The Collective Brain, every inspired, stressed, or delirious step of the way. Live the experience here, with updates every hour or so throughout the weekend.

Friday

6 p.m.: Kickoff event at Hinge Bureau

Here's a first glimpse at some of this year's team. The core group has been competing in The 48 Film Project for four years, and they're ready for a win, though Dan jokes that he wants to continue their second place tradition.

7:08 p.m.: Genre drawings and prop, character and line assignment

You can probably tell from Tyler's expression that "film de femme" is not the genre they'd hoped for. In fact, the team had to look up the definition and found out that the genre was actually invented by The 48 Hour Film Project. A film de femme features "one or more strong female characters" and can include chick flicks and romantic comedies. Fortunately, The Collective Brain has one female actress on its team. Break a leg, Joelle!

Also assigned were:

• Line of dialogue: "Oh really, tell me more."
• Character: Sam or Samantha Giordano, inventor.
• Prop: Hairbrush.

8:43 p.m.: Brainstorming at Ain's offices

After the kickoff event, the team rushes to Ain's offices in Broad Ripple to brainstorm. Brainstorming, for them, means drinking beer (22 drinks so far between the eight of them), eating pizza and wearing wigs.

Costume accessories tried on thus far:

• One pair of knee-high, bright red boots.
• One gold headband.
• One pair of silver armbands.
• One white belt.
• One cranberry red cardigan.
• Many wigs.
• One pair of fake bushy eyebrows.

9:09 p.m.: More brainstorming, more beer

The beer count is at 27, and much progress has been made (correlation or causation?). The team is hatching a plot.

9:45 p.m.: Strong women

"Wonder Woman is the ultimate feminist. We need to think about the message we're sending."

- Michael Countryman

10:14 p.m.: The more the merrier

More and more team members come and go. Some are only participating in part of the project because they have to work over the weekend. Vinnie left at one point to pick up a Wonder Woman costume from a friend. The doors to the office lock automatically, and Ain's phone was on the "Do Not Disturb" mode. So when Vinnie returned he had to throw rocks at the window (to no avail — the team thought the sound came from pipes) and finally banged on it with a broomstick.

Tyler, who has had many beers, is taking requests for more beer and more pizza.

11:00 p.m.: Lights, camera, action!

Time is of the essence, so Ain has decided that it is time to stop brainstorming. He asked the team:

It's eleven o'

clock. Can we shoot at least one

green screen tonight please?

Saturday

12:02 a.m.: The first take

After using paper clips, clothespins and pliers to fit Joelle into her borrowed Wonder Woman costume, the team finally does its first take in front of its green screen."Wonder Woman" (they never explicitly call her "Wonder Woman" in the film) is going to fight several bad guys tonight.

12:23 a.m.: Improvisation

Two of the villains "Wonder Woman" fights need weapons. For the second weapon, Tyler decides to forgo a prop knife and shatter a beer bottle. He wrapped the body of the bottle in masking tape and took a hammer to the bottleneck over a trash can in a parking lot. The end result was quite realistic.

1:24 a.m.: Wrapping up

After several shots on the green screen, the team is wrapping up shooting for the night, figuring out the details of the plot, and planning the day to come.

2:46 a.m.: Quotes from the late night crew

"Let's meet tomorrow at 7:30."

Someone tired: "Noon-thirty? Got it."

"Is that Dan snoring?"

"I'm not really that tired, but my throat is getting scratchy and my eyes are getting bleary."

3:16 a.m.

Ain is dashing around his SoBro house, telling the crew about the rewrite he did last night instead of sleeping. Someone needs to find a trampoline, stat, and what ever happened to those eyebrows from back at the office?

9:46 a.m. Running late!

The crew leaves the house in a mad dash for equipment. With the house quiet, Zero, Ain's cat, leaps onto the kitchen table and starts to lick at the cream cheese from Einstein's.

A 7:45 a.m. crew call has turned into a late nine o'clock rush to get the shoot started. No matter. The house is loaded with everything they need for the day: lights, camera, coffee, bagels and, alas, those wickedly curvaceous eyebrows for the character, "Inven-TOR."

10:54 a.m.: What zero sleep feels like

"As long as I'm thinking and going, this is me at my best, really."

- Ain Embry

11:29 a.m.: 'And that's it. That's perfect.'

12:09 p.m.: Putting the cuffs in fisticuffs

1:05 p.m.: Dan on the can

Villains be like, "I too pay the neighborhood associatative fees."

2:20 p.m.: Reworking the script

Dan: "I spilled coffee on your script."

Ain: "Dude, stop spilling stuff on my stuff."

Dan: "Can you be a little more vague, please?"

3:04 p.m.: No doughnuts for old villains

3:43 p.m.

Dan: "How's that doughnut, Michael?"

Michael: "I know it's been on the ground. I don't care."

4:21 p.m.: She jumps evil's face

Look out Dr. InvenTOR. Justice is overhead and coming down hard.

Operating on a few hours of sleep, Ain and his crew continue their shoot next door for the epic fight scene between the film's female protagonist and her arch-nemesis.

But here's the thing, Wonder Woman and Dr. InvenTOR have both retired since their days of fighting and committing crime respectively. Dr. InvenTOR is out of prison and Wonder Woman has settled comfortably into her suburban lifestyle.

Little did she know Dr. InvenTOR moved in next door to the retired super hero.

It's on!

5:10 p.m.: Required line. Check.

Wonder Woman returns home after meeting the new neighbor.

Husband: "How did it go?"

Wonder Woman: "It got weird."

Husband: "Oh, really? Tell me more."

5:40 p.m.: Required prop: hairbrush. Check.

Dan to Joelle: "I like how your hair has taken the form of the headband."

6:29 p.m.: Back to headquarters (Ain's offices)

After a day at Ain's house, they're ready to finish up at his office. It's about time, since Ain's dog was exiled to the backyard during the shoot (the cat was allowed to stay inside). Ain is leading a brief cleanup of his office, though they're still using one of Ain's Telly Awards as a doorstop. After some last shots with the green screen, the team will be done with principal photography. It's crazy to think that less than 24 hours ago, all they had were some storyboard doodles. Everyone is yawning.

Joelle, who says she's a "full-time mom," went to high school with Ain and Dan, and this weekend is the first she's seen them in 10 years. "They contacted me saying, 'Hey, do you want to do this?' " she said. "And, well, I didn't know I was going to end up being the lead."

7:22 p.m.: Like father, like son

Ain's 10-year-old son Turner has been acting in green screen scenes for his dad since he was four or five. Here, he's playing a henchman that "Wonder Woman" has to defeat.

7:40 p.m.: Behind the scenes

Tyler is a professional photographer, but he also knows how to work video graphics. "I remember once watching a TV commercial and it very well may have been a car commercial, something with graphics," he said. "I was trying to understand – how are these letters and numbers showing up?" He grew up next to Ain, who is 18 years his senior, and learned the basics of video editing from him. Right now, he's working magic with the green screen (he's already put Joelle in her invisible jet).

8:28 p.m.: How editing works

It'll be a quiet but long night of editing. While Tyler grabs dinner, Ain is piecing the movie together on Adobe Premiere, a footage and audio-editing software. Tyler will soon be stripping away all instances of "chromakey green" that appears in the shots and replacing it with backgrounds and elaborate props. That's why it's important that green screens are evenly lit, so that Premiere can recognize the color. Did you know that green screens are chromakey green because it's the color that is the least likely to appear in skin tone?

Editing 25 seconds of footage took Ain about 20 minutes.

"I'm going to go outside and drink a water bottle and get some fresh air before I sit down and (edit) this for 10 hours."

-Tyler Hromadka

9:22 p.m.: A haiku

Film editing is

Correcting by rewinding.

Rewind, Pause. Rewind. Pause.

10:20 p.m.: The name game

Titling anything might be one of the hardest things to do. So far, Jake has come up with a few words to get his title-brainstorming juices flowing:

• Wonder (wonderful, wondering)
• Invent (inventive, inventing)
• Power ("Power Moves")
• Domestic ("Domestic Wonder")
• Residential ("Residential Rivalry," "Residential Reunion")

10:30 p.m.: Headphones

Jake: Tyler, can you whip up the image on the left? The red and the blue one?

Tyler is nodding his head to music in his headphones.

Jake: Oh, his headphones are on. Tyler, I hate you.

Dan: Tyler, your house is on fire.

Tyler continues to nod his head to music in his headphones.

11:10 p.m.: "You're not you when you're hungry."

The Collective Brain has a one-year-old tradition in which members give Snickers bars to grumpy teammates. Dan said that Ain preemptively bought Snickers for him, but when Dan asked for one, all but half a bar was eaten. Grumpy Dan became grumpier, until Tyler (who ate one of the bars) persuaded him to finish the half. He did, and The Collective Brain lived happily ever after.

11:34 p.m.: The New Guy

Vinnie is new to The 48 Hour Film Project and The Collective Brain. He's the cinematographer, and when he watches his favorite movies, he thinks about how cool it would be to be behind the camera. "I found I could make a living out of it," he said. "I was good at it, and people valued my work and valued my creativity."

Ain: Vinnie, I'm sorry you had to work on this one.

Vinnie: How were they in the past?

Ain (laughs): Exactly the same.

Dan: Second place, here we come.

11:50 p.m.: Enter, Sam Giordano, Dr. InvenTOR

Here's one of the takes in which Wonder Woman finds out that Sam Giordano, Dr. InvenTOR, is her new neighbor.

Sunday

12:11 a.m.: Green Screen Fort

Turner builds a green screen fort.

"You know what you need in there? A tiny little flashlight," Ain told him. "You know what I have? A tiny little flashlight."

Meanwhile, a teammate comes by with a paper bag with the label, "Wine and Spirits."

1:19 a.m.: Technological difficulties

Tyler created a cool invention for Dr. InvenTOR on After Effects, another Adobe video-editing software. For some reason it was rendering slowly... and then it crashed. Ain was having trouble as well, so they restarted their computers. Fortunately, they saved their projects often!

1:43 a.m.: One man down 

Dan has irrevocably fallen asleep. Even his "Dr. InvenTOR" voice, blasted from Ain's computer next to him, won't stir him. He is the second sleeping person in this room if you include Ain's son Turner who is tucked away in his fort.

Hugh and the team recall the swarms of mosquitoes in Ain's yard. While Hugh held the boom (and therefore couldn't swipe at mosquitoes) he said he saw five of them "drain me."

2:56 a.m. Music changes everything. Music feeds the soul.

As the 11th hour looms, Tyler offers the perfect playlist. The crew is reaching a zombie-esque yet enlightened state, and as they blink under harsh lights, this starts to blare from the editor's corner. They nod along as if to say, "This is what we needed."

4:54 a.m. 

Ain nods off at the computer. Tyler glances over with bloodshot eyes and reminds his friend and collaborator that the film needs to be rendered in less than 14 hours. Ain wants to keep editing. His body disagrees. “All right, I’m done,” Ain says after falling asleep again. He has been up for nearly 48 hours (he woke up for work at 6 a.m. Friday), with a two-hour nap before the Saturday shoot. He was supposed to sleep for five hours, but an unfocused script kept him up, so he spent the early morning rewriting.

One year, it rained so hard during the 48 Hour Film Project that Hugh Triggs, who was working on an animated film, lost power in his studio. Filming for another project was delayed with a bike race downtown. And this same thing has happened to multiple teams: an actor is seen running down the street with a prop gun, and someone calls the cops.

With a female lead and the Collective Brain’s signature use of quick cuts, montage and humor, this year’s “film de femme” could be the team’s best shot yet. Tyler just created an invisible plane that flashes red after an unwitting villain crashes into it. The effects are impressive. When asked if he’s also headed to bed, Tyler shakes his head, deadpanning, “I’m in it to come in second place.” It’s a joke about the fact that, in all these years, the Collective Brain has never taken the top prize.

The two are the last ones left awake. They talk aspect ratios between yawns. Ain starts to crawl into “The Fort” — fashioned MacGyver-style out of chairs, green screen and acoustic foam — and cuddles up next to his son, 10-year-old Turner, who built the makeshift sleeping pod so he could be with his father. “See you in about three hours,” Ain says. He is snoring within a minute.

8:38 a.m.: Rise and shine and shoot

The movie needs to be done in 10 hours.

9:17 a.m.: And for special effects, drones!

11:26 a.m.: Where is it?

All that's left is a whole lot of editing as the pressure builds to meet the afternoon deadline -- a matter of hours. The last bit of video left to be shot is of a waving American flag for the closing sequence.

The edits between a few of the scenes look like the page of a comic book. As the scene changes, the camera pulls out of frame and moves on to the next frame as if the images were living in a comic, much like the remastered version of "The Warriors."

And for this final stretch of endurance, The Collective Brain will need to be warriors to battle the fatigue and tackle the laundry list of things left to do before time runs out.

Ain is fixing the timing, Dan is on audio, Vinnie just shot the flag video and Tyler is working on the graphics. And now Ain can't find the hard drive reader to add the flag footage.

12:04 p.m.: Hurry up, Tyler

Ain: "Hey man, these end credits better be good, because this music is killing it -- in a good way."

Dan: "Tyler, you have four and a half hours. Seriously."

12:49 p.m.: Deadline is coming

Just minutes remain until the self-imposed 1 p.m. deadline to review the film as a whole. "Brian is on his way with guitar and amp for shred session," Ain says of his friend. Audio is missing for Dr. IvenTOR's guitar solo in a scene of antagonizing guitar play. Think Van Halen.

1:09 p.m.: Brian shreds a la Van Halen

1:43 p.m. The film is shaping up

The room fills with sighs as the editing program Tyler is working in crashes.

"It's OK. It saves automatically," Tyler assures everyone.

The Collective Brain is behind schedule as they push Tyler to wrap up his editing so the film can be rendered and viewed as a partially completed piece. The crew needs to watch it, take notes and find everything that needs fixed.

"OK, I think maybe it's ready for first viewing. Tell me your complaints so I can write them down," Ain says.

But there's still many things left to do. Credits, drone footage and the cover of the book still need to be added.

2:42 p.m. All is silent for the skeleton crew

Ain's Broad Ripple office has cleared out, and only a skeleton crew remains. The room is uncharacteristically quiet as Ain, Tyler and Dan race to make their much needed edits. The final deadline is knocking on their door.

3:15 p.m.: The second viewing

The few people who remain gather for the second viewing. Boisterous laughs break the monotonous tone of the room. The film is slowly forming, but there are still scenes that need tweaking. Ain's goal is to finish in two hours so he at least has enough time to run the final product Downtown to the Hinge Bureau, seven miles south from his Broad Ripple office.

3:39 p.m.: Tarantino ultimatum

Ain gives his crew the ultimatum. Rendering, the process of finalizing all edits into one, cohesive file, may take one hour. He wants at least half an hour to run the file Downtown and to start rendering by the end of the hour. Despite the time crunch the crew remains lighthearted.

Ain: "It's like Quentin Tarantino made Wonder Woman."

Dan: "OK, I'll take that."

4:22 p.m.: Blowing past deadline

At the start of the hour Ain extends the rendering deadline by 10 minutes. The graphics are still not finished. Jake jots down all the names for the credits in his notebook. Waiver release forms for some of the children are missing. The crew is blowing past its deadline.

4:42 p.m.

"OK, Tyler, we really need to not be doing this."

-- Ain Embry on editing

5:16 p.m.: Down to the Tyler, er, wire

He's cut his losses.

Ain quits fiddling with the audio and timing edits and leaves his seat. He stands against the wall watching Tyler fidget with placement of the production logo.

Tyler sighs. Ain checks the time on his phone. Tyler is singled out. It's down to the wire as minutes mean the difference between success and failure.

6:02 p.m. Joking on deadline

Vinnie walks in a little too late.

Vinnie: "Did you guys just watch it? How did it go?

Dan: "It was terrible. We have to start over."

6:16 p.m. Dynamic Link not so dynamic

Dan is pacing. Several links are corrupted. Ain and Dan have been working in Adobe After Effects and Premier Pro. Dynamic Link is supposed to link their work together. It's not.

So Dan is pacing, and time is running out. They should have started rendering 20 minutes ago.

There's no time to even watch the short film one last time. Rendering has to start now.

Vinnie: "This is exciting."

Dan: "Who said that? Vinnie is out for next year."

6:26 p.m. Boiling water takes longer when you watch

Rendering has started, and the estimated time is more than an hour. The two most stressed-out crew members, Ain and Dan, have stepped out of the office.

A beep from another computer freaks out the crew. What was that? Just a notification. Car payment is due.

Vinnie: "Speaking of car payments, how fast is your car?"

Dan: "We're about to find out."

If the rendering finishes faster than expected, the crew will need to fly out the door.

6:40 p.m.: Down to the wire

An estimated 32 minutes left of rendering plus five minutes to copy plus 15 minutes to drive Downtown. The crew is sending two drivers taking two different routes in hopes one is faster. The deadline is 7:30. In 2011, one crew member said the team was counted late for turning in its film at 7:31. The submission was not accepted.

6:56 p.m.: Ticktock, ticktock

Rendering is nearly complete, and the stressed-out driver decides to joke.

Dan: "Hey, it's at the Lafayette Square Mall, right?"

The whole crew laughs.

7:30 p.m. With minutes to spare

7:36 p.m. Victory lap

The Collective Brain's entry, "Wonderful Neighbors," makes the cut with time to spare for a victory lap.

"Honestly, I didn't think we were going to make it," Ain says.

On the drive down Ain had time to watch the film one last time before arriving at the Hinge Bureau in Fountain Square.

The film was good to go.

And now the crew heads home for well-deserved slumber. For Ain, walking Bear before bed is on the docket and preparing his two sons for their first day of school Monday.

A crew member from a different team walks up to Ain and says he has seen the IndyStar.com article on The Collective Brain's 48 hours of fun, frenzy and film-making.

"That's actually what I'm going to do," Ain replies. "I'm going to read the article."

Epilogue:

Will The Collective Brain break its second-place jinx? Two screenings of all Indianapolis 48 Hour Film Project submissions will take place at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. Aug. 8 at the Tobias Theater at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Tickets are $10 per screening, but the entries are split between the two showings. So you'll need to buy two tickets if you want to see them all. The winner is expected to be announced by midnight.