Culture
48-Hour Shootout ’19: Following The Schoon Goonz
By: Rachael Beardsley
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Ohio University’s School of Media Arts and Studies hosted the 17th annual 48-Hour Shootout February 8-10, in which teams of students have 48 hours to write, shoot and edit a short film.
This year, almost 30 teams competed, including two animation teams. Each is given a genre, a prop and a line of dialogue, and they are judged on how well they incorporate those elements into their film.
Andie Walla, who competed in the event as a student and served as a judge in more recent years, has taken over as faculty advisor for the event. She said students gain knowledge about team building and working under pressure during the Shootout.
“There’s a lot of stress,” she said. “A lot of things happen in 48 hours. They have to make decisions quickly and work together as a team to get to the end point. I think all of those things just make them better people by being able to work under pressure and use their resources wisely in such a short amount of time.”
To get more insight into the process of making a short film in 48 hours, I followed a team competing in the open division as a mixture of under and upperclassmen. The Schoon Goonz faced the usual challenges of the competition, along with a few unique ones, but were ultimately proud of their work. Check out the timeline below to see how they progressed over the weekend.
Friday, 5 p.m.
Director Devyn Latture represented the team at the official kickoff meeting, where she randomly picked the elements they would work with over the weekend. The Schoon Goonz had to incorporate a cigar and the line “We’re dead, I don’t think we have anything to worry about anymore.” into a comedy film.
“I got the line and I was like, okay, whatever, I guess that could work out,” Latture said. “And then I got the genre, and we’re all part of Friday’s Live, a comedy sketch show, so we’re like this is our genre already.”
Getting the comedy genre, however, was somewhat of a disappointment.
“We wanted 48 to be an experience where we could branch out more and do things that we’ve never done before,” said Kay Jurma, the team’s captain, a producer on the project, as well as an actor in the film. “Of course it’s going to be our strong suit so we’re going to do well in it, it’s just, we work together on filming comedy skits already.”
“We’re going to find out if we’re actually funny,” Latture added.
Friday, 6 p.m.
When the teams were finally released from the meeting room at the start of the 48 hours, half of the Schoon Goonz headed to Wendy’s to get dinner and start brainstorming their script. They went through a few initial ideas, but eventually settled on a film about fraternity boys encountering a sorority of ghosts in a haunted house. Part of their humor element was going to include purposely-bad special effects.
The other half of the team, however, was in Cincinnati for a concert. Communicating ideas proved to be a little difficult.
“We got their script that they had written, and we were like, there’s no way we can do [special effects] seriously, we have to do it super comical,” said Jurma, who was in Cincinnati at the time. “We didn’t understand that in Athens they were already planning on doing it like that anyway.”
Friday evening – Saturday evening
The team wrote out their script, planned their filming locations, went prop shopping and created the sorority banners that would be seen in the film, working until about 2 a.m. Saturday morning. They chose Central Classroom Building on West Union Street as the spooky setting for their film, and started shooting the initial scenes at around 10 a.m. Saturday morning. The team took a lunch break at Union Street Diner at 2 p.m. and then returned to Central Classroom Building to wrap up the largest part of their filming. A few more scenes were shot at The Ridges outside the Kennedy Art Museum, and then the editing process began on Saturday night.
Sunday morning
Sunday was spent editing the film together. Overall, the process took about 10 hours.
“I’m really happy with the way that the effects worked out on screen,” said Jena Prosser, who worked on writing, editing and photography for the team. “We were all really nervous. We wanted them to look stupid, but if it doesn’t read well, it’s not going to be good. But it came across well.”
Sunday, 5:30 p.m.
The team met the deadline of 6 p.m. just in time, bringing their film to the screening at Memorial Auditorium. The theater was packed with media students ready to show off the weekend’s work.
In the end, the Schoon Goonz tied for second place in the open division with their film Spoook’d alongside the animated horror short Scream 4 Me. First place in the open division tied between The Lemoning: Lemonic Possession and Trash Magic. In the underclassmen division, third place went to Frank Johnson’s Underwear Rental. Camping Trip took second and O’Werewolves Where Art Thou took first.
As Walla predicted, the team said they learned a lot from the process. They’re looking forward to competing in future 48-hour Shootouts.
“For me, this is the first big narrative thing for a competition that I’ve ever really done,” said Michael Wyrick, one of the team’s lead editors. “I thought that it was really fun to do and I’m really looking forward to next year. It’ll be some of the same people, and we’ll put on something that we can be even more proud of.”