Film Title: Allocation
Chicken Noodle Soup is an ever-changing filmmaking team run by me, Hannah Flynn along with my mom, who complains that she can’t think of another story but always does. We love this challenge, we’ve done it ten times. We crave this crazy challenge but we weren’t satisfied with just making one movie a year and making one without the stress is just not as fun. So we found a way around that-but we not telling you what it is, you figure it out.
We are based in Johannesburg, South Africa, but we sneak our way into a bunch of cities around the planet just to take part in the 48 Hour Film Project chaos.
Living in South Africa; filmmaking opportunities are pretty limited when you don’t have money, industry contacts, or equipment that costs more than a secondhand microwave. We don’t have much but we do have friends scattered all over the world, and somehow that turned into this ridiculously fun opportunity to keep throwing ourselves into this challenge wherever and whenever we can.
Against all logic, madness and sleep deprivation, we have never missed a deadline, even with some pretty huge time zone challenges.
There’s nothing quite like the moment you pull your genre and realize you now have exactly 48 hours to write, shoot, edit, panic, question your life choices, render and export a film before the clock destroys you. It’s stressful in the most thrilling way.
At this point, “48” feels less like a number and more like a personality trait for us.
I shoot entirely on cellphones because proper film equipment is hilariously out of my budget. My actors are just my friends who somehow become incredibly committed performers once I start aggressively directing them. I’ve borrowed props from anyone willing to help, used car headlights for lighting, and once used actual real blood for my special effects thanks to a butcher who was definitely very confused by the request and the fact that stage blood was too expensive.
From the outside, this competition sounds easy. “You just make a short film in a weekend!” But It is absolutely not easy… It is creative warfare.
My mom has always been my writer, while I’ve been everything else: director , editor and cinematographer. I record the sound, run around, carry props, solve disasters, offer emotional support to actors and occasionally lose my mind. Every team has looked different over the years, though some people keep coming back for reasons I genuinely can’t explain. Maybe Stockholm syndrome.
But every single time, after 48 straight hours of chaos, nobody leaves unhappy. Everyone leaves exhausted, sleep deprived, slightly delirious and proud. Proud that for one tiny weekend we became a real movie crew.
What we lack in resources we make up with imagination, stubbornness, and the ability to make something out of absolutely nothing. Maybe I’ll make it all the way to my motion picture making dreams one day, but either way, I’ll always have this strange little collection of films and memories.
Some of the movies were genuinely good. Some were… questionable . But every single one was fun, every single one taught us something, and every single time we got to spend one completely insane weekend pretending we were filmmakers.
Which, honestly, we are.
