The First Film is in the Can... I Mean Cart

I'm happy to announce that the 52 Weeks Project is officially off the ground thanks in no small part to the talents of Michael Boyne and Rose Itzcovitz who generously gave up portions of their New Years Eves to be the subjects of the first film. Talk about dedication! The setup for the short happens around the countdown to 2011 and while I wasn't quite able to get down into Times Square for the ball-drop like I'd hoped I quickly realized that I couldn't have shot in there at all. Instead we ended up in the southern section of Central Park where the crowd was still pretty dense and we had a front row seat for the fireworks.

A couple of nights later we finished up the rest of the shoot while running around midtown. All in all, production took between five and six hours and it was a lot of fun. This film was probably more on the "guerilla" end of the shorts I'll shoot on this project, but it was a good one to cut my teeth on. I'm getting more of an idea of what can be done in 150 seconds. 

The hard part now is the wait. It's not practical to send one of these cartridges off to the lab and so I'll have to wait until I have a couple more to send with it. Expect to see it posted here in early-to-mid February. For now, I'm working with the lovely and talented Jae Mann to nail down what the next short will be. More to come on that soon...

(photo courtesy of Flickr user memeticfield)

1 of 52

I'm planning on kicking the new year off right by shooting the first short of the 52 Weeks Project the very first weekend of January. I picked up my first cartridge of film today and I'm headed out to do a little scouting tonight.

No details yet, but I'll post a little more about it next week; and of course the film itself should be up by early February. For now, I'll just leave you with the apt title of the piece:

"2011"