The Race Against Time with LCA
Making a movie involves lots of components: planning, scripting, directing, and editing. And also plenty of time… or maybe not. Recently, the Lights, Camera, Action film club, known as LCA, participated in a 48 hour film challenge, attempting to make a short movie in just two days.
For the past 15 years, Dordt University has hosted the Prairie Grass Film Challenge, a competition that challenges high school, college and post-college participants to make a movie in 48 hours. DSU has participated several times, and won in the college division in 2016. This year, the film challenge was cancelled due to Covid-19. But Colin Sabers, a Film major and the president of LCA, stated, “LCA’s Vice President, Albert Pavlinac, and myself really wanted to make one more 48 hour challenge film, before we graduate this year. We have learned a lot in our past years of participating in the challenge and we really wanted a chance to pass that on for those that participate in the challenge in future years. We decided to make a film on our own. We couldn’t submit it to Dordt to be judged but we could still have a great time creating a film!”
Typically, the Prairie Grass Film Challenge sends out an email at the beginning of the 48 hours, giving participants a prompt, with several required elements for the film, such as genre, prop, or character. This way, the teams are unable to plan ahead of time. The LCA club elected to follow the same format this year, using an online generator to supply the prompts. Then they went to work. Max Hardyk, a junior Film major and the secretary of the LCA, said that the most challenging part was staying awake the whole time, as they used the first day to plan and the second day to film and edit.
The film that resulted is a comedy and drama known as Scrabbled that features Hardyk as well as Tate Mohlenkamp, also a junior Film major, as two detectives attempting to solve a whodunit at a coffee shop. Both Sabers and Hardyk enjoyed the process of creating the film, with Hardyk stating, “My favorite part was definitely the editing since you could see all of the shots get pieced together,” and Sabers concurring.
When asked if he would change anything, Sabers said, “I honestly can’t think of anything I would do differently. I was strongly involved in the 48 hour film challenge for the past two years, and I learned so many things to do differently after those two years that it all seemed to come together this year.”
The LCA film club will be premiering the 10-minute movie on Friday the 27th at 7:00 PM in the Habeger Science Center auditorium, and invite all who are interested to attend.
