So we're working on the Challenge right now. Simply, the Challenge is an all-weekend event where 17 teams each work on 1/3 of 3 movies. On Friday night you write a script for a 7-minute film, working with actors' headshots, a song, and a prop. On Saturday morning you hand that script off to a different team (the one whose headshots you had) and get the one written for your actors. You have all day and night Saturday to film that script and then Sunday morning you hand in your footage, get a third team's footage and have until Monday evening to edit that footage into a completed short movie.

Because I'm going to be the main editor, I was excused from writing duties, so last night I went to the screening of Party Beach U.S.A. (It was very well-received by the actors and all of Phillip's friends (it's a low standard, but if you don't even get above the actors-and-friends bar you're in real trouble).) I came home at 1:30 am to find Shaun, Sean, Jin, Ryan, and Clif huddled over three laptops in the living room. They were round-robining the writing of the script, as well as writing character bios for all the characters. I went to bed with them still chugging away -- this morning they handed the script off, but none of them seemed sure exactly how it had turned out. Hopefully it made sense.

Our script looks pretty good. The first thing we did was cut two characters (we're ruthless) and recast the whole thing from what the writers had intended. Then we sat down for a couple read-throughs and a screen-breakdown and shot list. We finally started filming around 2:00 and we're on our 5th scene (of 26 scenes) about now. The trickiest will be the stuff in the car. I'm taking a quick break here -- Shaun is the camera and director and Clif is fulfilling my AD role right now by logging the footage as we go (to make life easier for the poor sap who has to edit this stuff).