You might have seen filmmakers joining a 48 hours film project, which is a contest where you work with a team to make a short film within 48 hours, from writing to filming and editing to a finished short film.
I have worked on many 48 hours film projects, also tried my hands on joining 48 hours film projects with my own team and have enough experience to talk about this subject.
Determining if it’s worth it to join a 48 hours film project, is it all determined what goal you want to achieve? Gain on set experience? Network? Or just to win?
Student
If you are a novice or a student and want to gain set experience and another movie to add to your portfolio? You should join a team and get those experiences, however more likely be helping a novice team who are often still in search of a crew. As often professional teams likely work with their usual production crews.
Networking
That is why using it for networking, more likely won’t get much out of it as more often a lot of the novice teams seem to do a lot of 48 hour film projects and passion projects, yet often do not result in working together on paid projects. It would be better to just spend money visiting network parties at bigger film festivals.
Winning
Just to win, I would say the chance of winning depends on many factors, may it be luck in drawing the right genre. But also if your team has a professional crew who can really produce a quality film in 48 hours. Nowadays a lot of big production companies join in the contest, making it harder for novice teams to win, as their level of experience is on a different level. Which also makes it less fun to do 48 hour film projects as certain cities make it impossible to win as a novice team against professional teams.
Also the problem of some 48 hour locations has its hidden agenda to push a certain narrative and some jurors are very biased in how they vote, especially when the Jury are Art Academy filmmakers.
More often working on 48 hour film projects don’t expect that you are making a quality film when you are in a novice group, as there are more often teams joining the contest who aren’t filmmakers, just doing all this for fun and experience. And if you expect more from it, you likely won’t have a good time. And more often the novice teams are often not even close to the level of film academy students. Even when the teams have multiple years of experience working on 48 hours film projects, I notice a lot of the novice teams aren’t improving much as most often the large part of crew members don’t rejoin the teams and quality of their films become lesser over the years, instead of improving after each project.
Own Team
Reality: if you can set up your own team, it is better just to work on your own passion short film project, where you have much more time to write, plan and produce a higher quality short film everybody can be proud of and use the money you would had to register your team with, to send your short film to bigger film festivals and potentially win awards.
If you are professionally busy as a filmmaker, suggest not bother joining a team at all, as more often there will be a proper paid job appear during the same weekend that is more important to do, then having the weekend booked months ahead to volunteer on the competition. As it be annoying to last moment cancel the 48 hours film project and give them the bad news that you have a paid job that is more important. So save yourself the headache by not joining it at all.
If you just want to try it out just once, by all means join a team and experience it once for fun. Just don’t have high expectations on the results.
