This is the result of the first prototype of a workshop I’m planning to call “Flashmob Filmmaking”. The idea is to get a large group of people together to make a film — from pre-production to post — in two hours. Writing the script, shooting the footage, and cutting it together, all in that short span of time.

When this idea hit me, I envisioned it as something to do at some kind of fandom convention — a place full of regular people who’d be interested in doing something creative. But I needed to make sure it worked first, so I tried it at a party.

As you can see, it definitely worked. For the most part. We did go slightly over two hours total, so I’ll need to refine the formula to keep things moving along.

And I need to figure out a better solution for shooting footage that can be edited right away, without wasting any time to capture, transfer, or transcode. We shot this on a camera hooked up to Adobe OnLocation on my MacBook, and carried the laptop around along with the camera. Then, I put it into Target Disk Mode and connected it to my larger and more capable iMac, and used ClipWrap to make the footage editable into Final Cut. Unfortunately, the process of Target Disking and ClipWrapping took up a good five minutes — which is fast compared to capture or transcoding, but still too long for this purpose. I’ll probably need to get a camera which shoots to SD cards in a QuickTime-native format (or maybe ClipWrappable, since that process only took about a minute; I can live with that).