The 2019 season had some bumps in the road that ended up being serendipitous. We had our planned events, but due to the timing and back-end needs of certain events, things got shifted around, and what we found was that it was a nice "scaffolded" approach to presenting our events.

It starts with the Swedes. You take a movie that's already been made, and you make it yourself. But without the use of any special effects. Basically, point the camera and make a movie.  You have a complete source material and script. Your main job is to pare it down to the time limit and make sure it looks like the movie you're supposed to be making. Basically, it's "covering" a movie. It's a great exercise for filmmakers of all levels.

Next, our "Adaptation" style event. We'd done this previously with the Vid-E-Uwe Boll (a terrible play on words about infamous video game adaptation artist, Uwe Boll, presented during sportsball's Bowl Season), where teams were prompted with adapting a video game with a genre bent twist. We did this again in 2019 with Shakespeare in the Backyard, where teams genre bent The Bard's tales. In this event, you have a source material, but now we add another step. You must adapt that source material into a short film within the confines of the assigned genre. You still have to point the camera, etc. In some cases, adaptations of the source material exist, but that's not what we're looking for.  This is "covering" a source material with your own original twist.

The 240-Hour Film Race, born out of a disdain for the stressful tribulations of a 48-Hour Film Race, removes yet another safety net. Here, teams are not working with a source material at all, and instead are prompted to make a completely original film. We still give the box (aka required elements and genre), which does give you some guidance on where your film should go. But here, there's no covering. It's your team's creativity on display.

Finally, the "Series" style event. Teams are once again creating an original piece, and the box grows a bit tighter. There's style guides and required elements that fit within a larger box to make the crowd-sourced series piece together as a whole. There are now two seasons of Captain Asteroid and a first phase of the Cinemadrome Cinematic Universe that show just how fun this can be, but it's also the most challenging of the events. And the pay off is oh so sweet.

We look forward to employing and evolving this seasonal design philosophy in 2021 and into the future. We hope you'll join us for the full season!