Tell us about your experience during the 48HFP.
It was a crazy, mad rush from the offset. We were lucky we had a good team of actors (everyone was an actor) and we’d worked together before and therefore had great working chemistry.
How did your team come up with the concept for Cut?
We basically sat up till about 2am in the morning brainstorming various storyline scenarios, given the constraints we had, and some that we imposed on ourselves—keep locations to a minimum, keep dialogue to a minimum and maintain spontaneity in the performances using a lot of improvisation.
Tell us more about Cut.
A social gathering goes wrong and it turns into a bit of a horror movie! We had drawn the “horror” genre and that completely threw us off any other ideas we had explored prior to the briefing.
What factors do you think led to your team’s success?
Preparation, preparation, preparation! We’d hired our equipment for a full 48 hours only to find we simply didn’t have a good enough story until the second night. Given that our tale happens at night, that only left us with about six hours to shoot before daybreak! Giving ourselves, as actors, a creative challenge that was manageable and within our individual strengths as performers was key—we didn’t have time to rehearse.
How has the competition affected you as an actor/filmmaker?
Well it’s certainly shown us what we can achieve when push comes to shove, we burnt ourselves out totally and came up with a week or two’s worth of work virtually overnight thanks to an amazing team performance and inhuman effort from our team mate Waikit who had to continue his work as editor, right after having been Director of Photography through the night!
You can watch Cut at www.tinyurl.com/48HFPcut. The 48 Hour Film Project takes place Apr 29-May 1. $140. For more information and to sign up, visit www.48hourfilm.com/singapore.
