It’s that time of year again! The 2880 Film Festival presents the participating film teams with the crazy challenge of having to come up with a script for a short film, find actors and locations, shoot the film and do the whole postproduction including the music – all in 48 hours (2880 minutes).
To top it off, the festival starts with each team being assigned a unique combination of a randomly drawn film title and film genre for their project.
After last year’s adventure short film Two Are in Sync, this year my film team Bamboo Bandit was tasked to come up with a Film Noir titled “1000 mal gerührt”, a play on words which roughly translates to “1000 stirs” and alludes to a famous German song of a similar title.
Apart from my usual task to score the film, this year I also came up with the script and had to do some acting myself since we ran out of available actors. On Saturday evening, my teammate Andy and I started editing the film together. A few hours later we were done cutting. Then I wasted some precious time doing color-grading before finally deciding to go full black & white. To finalize the visuals, I changed the film’s aspect ratio to achieve that cinematic look and then did some voice over stuff and foley. When all this was done, it was Sunday morning, 9am – 11 hours until deadline, time to finally start composing the music!
I quickly came up with a nice melody, but soon after decided that the film’s tense nature did not leave the space for many melodic statements, so I used fragments of the melody instead. This soundtrack needed to focus on building tension and I decided to do this slowly, starting rather calm and building it all up to the climax during the big finale. After the plot twist that follows, I chose to not have any music at all apart from a bit of ambience, because I felt it would give the ending an unnerving realistic touch and make the viewer feel as if he’s been watching this perverse game over the surveillance cameras the whole time.
For the ending credits, we opted for a bit of comic relief, which gave me the opportunity to finally showcase the melody I had come up with in the beginning, albeit in a rather circus-like arrangement.
We wrapped everything up in time for the deadline and eventually the film made it into the final round of the festival, ending up in the year’s top 10 submissions! Check it out below!