The Sacramento Film and Music Festival issued a challenge this year to thirteen filmmakers:

10 days to shoot a ten minute film, the theme of which to be decided by the Film Festival. 

We had just returned from Africa and were gearing up to shoot Hope when this little morsel was laid on the table, Ten days to shoot, edit and present a ten minute film. Three of those days we would be setting up and shooting the other film, due by the end of the following week for the October Sacramento Festival of Cinema. Leaving us a week.

Naturally, I went for it. 

When I told Brian he gave me a look that confirmed my belief that I am just to this side of asking too much of people in this life--but he also agreed to do it if we could shoot it in one night, as he had to finish editing the other project. 

The following Thursday I sat with the other directors and listened with baited breath to what the theme would be:

The Undead and the Seven Deadly Sins

Did I mention I have a ton of horror fiction I've written? Yeah, I grew up voraciously reading the genre. So my glee was justified. I enlisted the help of my friend Matt Patterson via Yahoo Messenger (no, you don't get a link) and we hashed out some ideas on deadly sins until he introduced me to Cassian the scribe, and the rest is history. Matt now gets to have all of my ideas bounced off his feverish little skull. He is, after all, the guy who transcribed, bound and personalized my copy of The Book of Enoch so I could carry it around Africa with me...

Long story short (heh) the crew from Hope jumped on for an extra night and shot Acedia, the piece I finalized after our second all-nighter. I wrangled Ron Randolph and Adam Fong, who brought a friend to beat on for the fight scene, and aked my son politely if he would mind playing with us all night. He said sure, so we stumbled into First Baptist Church of Sacramento and shot 'til 7:30 AM Tuesday. 

All told, the crew had had approximately 12 hours of solid sleep since Friday morning. 

I swore as an actor I would never rely on a script during a shoot. Well, at 4:30 AM, for the first time in my life, my brain simply ceased functioning for a good 10 minutes. Click, fizzle, game over, you don't even get the home version done.

The outtakes are great.

Brian was not availabel to edit as he had to slice and dice "Hope" for festival deadline. I'd never pushed the buttons before in FCP, only supervised, so our then-roommate volunteered to do the work. After  the three days of editing, I checked in with my interim editor and she stated we had 'a long way to go.' II realized that I had, um, more footage than required. By about, uh, twice as much. And the deadline was, er, that night. By 7:00 PM. In about 2 hours.

Tony Sheppard of the Festival Board  was quite gracious when I called and said I wasn't going to make 7 PM--could I be a smidge late? He  allowed me an extension. Midnight. After all, only 7 filmmakers completed the challenge in the first place. I made an agreement I'd open myself to a public lambasting, and it was a done deal.

And the footage? Well, let's just say that KIll Bill Volume 2 wasn't the only cheap cop-out taken in 2004 to buy time...

So yeah, Acedia taught me two valuable things:

1. Always, no matter how small, no matter how well you know the piece, MAKE A SHOT LIST. We lost several angles of coverage when we lost the ability to speak intelligibly after 3 AM. There are entire scenes needing a reverse on them. There are sound issues. There are FLAWS. Which leads me to

2. Always commit fully, give it everything you possibly have in reserve, and when all is said and done accept the fact you did the absolute best you could with what you had. If you give it your all and then realize there issues, remember those and learn from them. We shot this in a night, edited it in three more, and though it wasn't tearing down a temple and rebuilding it in three days, I feel we did offer a piece that completely took the Trash Film Orgy midnight crowd by surprise. What's more, it had a redemptive theme that I'm quite pleased with--afterwards, a friend of mine approached and said "My Jesus freak friends want to talk to you." Two ladies approached and floored me by not only saying they loved it, but that they got it and were blown away because they never expected to see something like that there. Amen.

Acedia will be up, flaws and all, for everyone's pleasure shortly. In the meantime, the teaser I threw together in 20 minutes to split "Volume I" and "Volume II" is up. I placed it at the beginning of the second half to re-cap the folks on what was going on...of course, they showed them back to back, sooooo....

I will be re-cutting this footage, BTW. It needs it.

Watch. Listen. Enjoy. Discuss. Repeat.