WIT NEWS ITEM | 2005 48 Hour Film Project

Mike Bass and Katie Carson at work on the set of WIT's latest 48 Hour Film.

WIT DOES THE BUSINESS IN 48 HOURS

POSTED 5.2.05

Washington Improv Theater has emerged triumphant from their fourth annual foray in to the world of impromptu weekend movie-making.

A group of players from Mainstage, Jackie and Improv Nation joined forces under the banner of WIT Films to conceive, create, edit and submit a seven-minute short film for DCs 48 Hour Film Project.

This year's Project featured seventy two teams from the DC area, setting a record for the event. As always, participants were required to make use of a character (R. Moellering, a hypochondriac), a prop (a bottle of wine) and a line of dialogue ("It was like that when I got here") somewhere in the course of their film. WIT's team selected "Buddy Film" as their genre for the weekend, and dove in.

As is usually the case with this competition, significant portions of WIT's script were improvised, allowing the players to take advantage of their experience working with the Neutrino Video Projects.

"It's a pretty easy fit for us performance-wise," said Project director and Neutrino cameraman Tyler Korba of the weekend-long process. "Our people are used to shooting scenes and telling stories on film that are completely improvised. With Neutrino, we've only got one shot to get it right, and we're working with about 30 minutes. Coming off of that sort of schedule, 48 hours starts to look like a lot of time."

A few computer glitches aside, this year's film ended up being relatively free from major complications. "But our continuity is all screwed up," admits Korba. "We originally planned to have our story taking place over a couple of days, so we shot our main characters (Dave Johnson and Rory Scovel) in different outfits for different scenes.

"When we sat down to edit it all, though, we had to build the story a little tighter than we planned. Now it looks like Dave changes clothes on the way to get coffee in the morning. But if that's the worst mistake we made, I think we did pretty well."

Because it finished on time, WIT's entry, Occupational Hazard, is eligible for individual awards and possible selection as one of the Best Of films for DC. The movie will screen at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring on Thursday, May 5th at 9:30PM.