Trish Clark couldn’t believe what she was reading. After she joined the 48 Hour Film Project’s newsletter in 2010, the product of a friend’s suggestion that she try to bring the festival to New Haven, words were appearing before her eyes that couldn’t be right. Yes: the Project’s organizers were amenable to bringing it to Connecticut. No: they weren’t thinking of the Elm City.
“I saw that they were looking to have it in Hartford … and I sent them a message and I was like, ‘I think that’s a typo. I think you meant New Haven’ … And they realized after talking to me that, oh yeah, we should do it in New Haven,” she said in an interview with the Independent, smiling at the possibility that the state’s political capital might be mistaken for its cultural epicenter.
Thomas Breen Photo
This weekend, the New Haven chapter of the 48 Hour Film Project will celebrate its fifth anniversary. Twenty-three participating teams will have two days to write, shoot, edit, and deliver a five to seven-minute film that abides by a small but critical set of criteria: the film must correspond to a particular genre, include a character with a particular name and occupation, feature a particular prop, and contain a particular line of dialogue.
All of these variables will come to life at the festival’s kickoff event this Friday night at the Outer Space in Hamden. There, Clark, New Haven’s resident producer for the fest, will establish the specific ground rules for this year’s competition. While the genres will vary per team, all of the participants must work with the same character, prop, and line.
Examples? The character Charles or Carla Hollandaise, a plastic surgeon; a tennis ball; and the line, “I made you who you are, and I can just as easily break you.”
There’s the international angle to make it special, too. From Columbus, Ohio to Warsaw, Poland to Tunis, Tunisia, each participating city’s version of the festival brings together teams of various sizes, all looking to find a rush of inspiration and enough technical competence to throw together a movie in 48 hours.
“The big part is just the challenge of getting through it,” said Clark, a city employee with a background in TV and film. “When you’re on a feature or a big production, you can maybe put off [certain problems] till the next day. But here, you need to make quick decisions and stand by them.”
A still from last year’s New Haven winner, Benjamin Hecht’s “Family Ties.”
While a team’s involvement in the fest is concentrated to one hectic weekend, Clark’s role as the New Haven producer requires weeks of preparation and follow up. She hosts information sessions leading up to the competition weekend and helps establish connections between team leaders and prospective actors, cameramen, and crew. To handle volume this year, she added a “Casting Call” section to the project’s Facebook page, so that directors can scroll through actor headshots and find the perfect face to fit that yet-to-be-determined character. She reserves the screening location and the competition’s judges, film professionals who will attend the screenings and help determine which entries will advance to the 48 Hour Film Project’s annual “best of” festival, Filmapalooza.
“You’re just looking for the same thing you’d look for in any show or film,” Clark said when asked what makes a good 48 hour film. “A great acting performance, great cinematography, great editing or special effects.”
She still remembers memorable characters – a hubcap-clad superhero nicknamed “Hubcap Man” who became the unofficial mascot of the first New Haven fest, or 2014’s PTSD-stricken veteran with a serious obsession with plastic toy soldiers – and believes they can separate great films from good ones.
Much like this year’s New Haven Documentary Film Festival, the New Haven 48 Hour Film Project represents another small but exciting attempt to galvanize this city’s nascent filmmaking community.
“We’re not Hollywood, we’re not LA, but it should be a big filmmaking community,” Clark said. “There are a lot of small groups in all of these New England states that, if they just start talking to each other, it would be huge … we have so many great locations … You could get a farm and a business office, probably within 5 minutes of each other.”
“We have our own little network of producers and filmmakers,” she added. “We definitely try to make it more of a filmmaking community.”
The New Haven 48 Hour Film Project will have its kickoff event at the Outer Space from 6 – 7pm this Friday. The screenings of the finished films will take place at the Bow Tie Criterion Cinemas on Temple Street on Wednesday, August 5th and Thursday, August 5th. Click here to learn more about the festival.