Tickets to screenings of Asheville’s 48 Hour Film Festival at Asheville Pizza and Brewing sell out fast, and with the cast and crew of Team UNCA in the crowd, you can be certain that there will be a big reaction to the annual submission from faculty, students, alumni and friends of the university.
It’s certainly been true in the past. Team UNCA has gained a reputation for producing comedy films, and has garnered two Best Film awards in the past three years, among a host of other awards. This year they won the award for Best Acting Ensemble and Runner-Up for Best Film for the light-hearted children’s adventure tale, “Summer School Sleuths: Something Stinks in the Gym.”
Not your typical film festival, the 48 Hour Film Project requires all film submissions to be completed within one weekend. That’s just 48 short hours to write, shoot and edit an original film—and maybe even eat and sleep a little.
To insure that all production work occurs within the time limit, the films must include a specific character, prop, and line of dialogue. This year the required elements were a gym instructor, a bell, and the line “It’s your choice. What are you gonna do?”
Frank Arata, a junior mass communication major who played the cynical Coach Cedric in “Summer School Sleuths,” made sure to arrive on set early Saturday morning to start learning his lines.
“Acting is something I’ve always wanted to do,” Arata said, who usually spends his time behind the camera in his visual media production classes. “This gave me the opportunity to do it.”
With such a limited time frame to create the film, the pressure was on to complete shooting on Saturday, and spend Sunday editing the footage into a finished, polished movie. While Team UNCA ran into a series of location and scheduling issues this year, they completed their film on time and submitted it before the deadline Sunday (late films are automatically disqualified).
“The biggest reward was sitting there in the theater, and seeing myself on the screen and having people laugh,” Arata said. “That was pretty cool. That was definitely worth the lack of sleep.”
Arata hopes to have the opportunity to continue in the film business after he graduates—and he’s not alone. The three youngest members of the cast, Ruby Grace Neu, Olivia Slatton and Renny Ball were inspired to create their own homegrown version of the project.
“They’re doing a ‘48 Hour Film Camp,’” Anne Slatton, lecturer in mass communication and Team UNCA’s director, explained. “They’re like, ‘you need to give us a genre and a line, and don’t tell us what it is!’ That makes me feel like, regardless of whether we win or lose, it was a success because they were inspired and they had fun. That made me really happy.”
(Photo by Natasha Meduri.)