Film Title: The Magical Mystical But Never Mundane
We were extremely excited to take part in the Manchester 48 hour film challenge this year! Being based in North Wales, it only seemed right to name ourselves ‘The Red Dragons’.
We had assembled a keen bunch who were willing to be our core team of crew and cast beforehand, and we sat anxiously at the kick off event to find out what genres we would select, and those were…FANTASY and WORKPLACE FILM!
Initially we were most excited by fantasy, but practically it seemed more challenging. We passed the genres on to our writing team who got to work, and magically came up with an idea to blend the two genres together – an interesting combination right?! That evening was frantic – inventing our story and script, messaging people we knew to try to nail down a cool location that would fit (a huge thank you to Gwrych Castle and estate for their support!), preparing gear and searching for suitable costumes!
Then the shoot day itself was so much fun! We had two main locations – a cool outdoor location called Tan Yr Ogof caves, and our historic interior location of Ty Crwn cottage whose quirky features, furniture and decorations provided the perfect backdrop for our workplace-fantasy mashup! We wrapped filming at 11pm on Saturday evening, and all slept like logs that night!
Sunday was editing day, and that turned out to be the most challenging of all! We had to record some voiceovers, get some B roll footage, compose our music, and edit our film…not much then?
As things often do, time ran away, and it was a mad dash to the finish line – we submitted our film with about 3 minutes to spare and we could finally breathe a sigh of relief and celebrate that we had not actually killed each other Are there some nit picky things we wished we could change? Definitely yes! But are we chuffed with what we managed to pull together as a team in 48 hours? Absolutely!
We can’t wait to see it on the big screen now, and watch all the other great films produced in 48 hours! ‘The Red Dragons’, over and out!