"John and Clara"

This past weekend I was fortunate enough to work with the mega talented Kerey Viswanathan again on another short film for the 48 Hour Film Project as an Associate Producer and Actor. The way the competition work is that each team of filmmakers have 48 Hours to write, direct, shoot, edit and score a film. So on Friday at 6:00pm we picked a genre out of a hat and then along with the other teams were given a character we had to use, a line of dialogue, and a prop that we had to incorporate into the film.

I would like to keep as much of the film as a surprise until after it premieres this week. Writer Andrew Saxe and Kerey came up with a brilliant script with a high energy plot, and one of the most fun characters I have gotten the opportunity to portray. The entire process of filming was very rewarding, even though we shot most of the film in the middle of nowhere in a tick filled jungle/forest in Middletown, CT where it was in the mid 90's the entire day. Bambi's daughter almost gave us a heart attack when she jumped out of a bush onto our set, right before we almost got attacked by Leatherface... Four seconds later we realized it was just a runaway dirt bike that was speeding straight into our direction at 60 mph. Luckily for us, the biker made good use of his brakes.

The lovely Ashley Hamel was the "Clara" to my "John" and she really set the bar high in terms of jumping right into her character and giving me a lot to work off. Ashley is an Improv Queen and because we were learning our scenes literally right before we shot them, we had to do a little improv here and there. She also has such an amazing voice, we spent our 2.5 minutes of downtime during the day singing "Agony" from Into the Woods (it was more of a coincidence, rather than irony, I swear).  Jason Graves, who was my other co-star and Producer, is the heart of the film and a real trooper through the entire experience. Let's talk about method acting! On a side note, at the end of the day, I found out I knew of Jason before actually meeting him. As a Newtown native, he actually gave a beautiful speech and reading from the Qur'an at the Interfaith Community Vigil that aired live globally after the Sandy Hook school shooting.

I don't have a list of our entire production team at this moment but some of our outstanding members included Hollie Kinney (Editor), Malcom Cameron (Sound), Colleen Brown (1st Assistant Camerawoman), Daniel Dahlstrom (Director of Photography), Tristan Hess (Props/PA), Michelle Hahn (PA), Wojiech (whose last name I did not catch, but was our life saving Grip) and Tyler Geis (Assistant Director), who everyone said looked like a different Hollywood leading man, much to his embarrassment!

Shooting a film is a lot of work,but so rewarding. We were able to overcome the few setbacks that we had and submitted our film by the 7:30pm deadline on Sunday, much to our relief. Now we just continue to wait until it premieres in New Haven in the next few days!

I will definitely keep you all updated!

~J

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