One thing that made this last weekend so busy that I'm still catching up was the 11th Fast Forward Film Festival. I looove the FFFF. 21 hours seems, to me, to be just the right amount of time to make a 3 minute film. It's an evening of brainstorming, a morning of filming, and an afternoon of editing.

This time the theme of the FFFF was "At the Drive-In" and the topics for the movies were poster tag lines from old action, horror, and sci-fi movies. Our topic was: "When the heroes are forgotten. When the stakes are life and death. There's one stand you've got to take. There's one rule you've got to break." (I just did the search to discover that this was the tagline to a medical drama, Article 99. I didn't look before we made our movie because I didn't want to know.)

FuzzyCo's FFFF crew this time was me, Shaun, Brian Goodman, and Sean Cusick. Shaun had a CCC gig Friday night and I was at a Schadenfreude show, so I coerced my friend Kate into going and picking up the topic for me. After a short amount of brainstorming Saturday morning, we decided to do a sequel to Ted McGuillicutty, Man of Action, starring Brian as Joe McGuillicutty, Shaun as the villain, and Sean as everyone else. We would use the lines from the suggestion at dramatic moments in the film.

This was our highest production value shoot yet -- we filmed at my house, on Lake Shore Drive, at the 59th Street Metra station, and all over Chinatown. We had special effects and stunt motorcycle riding and real (cheap) Chinese weapons.

Somehow, between all the running around, and then the demands of editing the film down to 3 minutes (I seem to naturally tend towards 4 minute movies) all the suggestion lines got lost. So I'm not sure if the movie looks like it was really inspired by the suggestion, but it was, I swear. I'm really happy with the result. I even turned it in 8 minutes before the deadline.