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Adventure, Everyday documentary

Adventure, Everyday documentary

Project Goals: The first year of the Knoxville Film Festival came with it a section called the Seven Day Shoot. Filmmakers were tasked with a genre, having one Knoxville landmark in the film, it had to be under seven minutes in length, and had to be turned in in only seven days. There were twenty-five teams, six genres with four teams picking each genre, and one team got to shoot a film without having the constraint of a genre.

Adventure, Everyday documentary

Our Solutions: We had not shot a film before. Fortunately, we were the ones that pulled “no genre” out of the proverbial hat. On night one we wrote three scripts. Script one was difficult, in that it needed to have fog along the Gay Street Bridge. So that was out. The second script needed too many actors. The third script seemed to be the best bet, only needing three actors. On day three, with no luck finding three actors and not one bit of footage shot, we had to pivot. A couple we knew had bought an Airstream a year previously, had spent the past year fixing it up, were having a going away party that coincided with day four of the shoot, and were setting off on road having recently quit their jobs on the morning of day seven of the shoot. We pitched them on the night of day three, started shooting footage on days four-five-six, interviewed them on day five. We started cobbling together the footage at nights of day five-six. The initial intent was to have a local musician score the film, but that musician liked our temp audio from an online source. We finished up the film on night six, turning it in on night seven.

Adventure, Everyday documentary

Results: A month later at the film festival our film, along with the other twenty four films, were shown on the big screen in an actual theater. The competition was tough, in that we were going up against many major production companies. At the awards ceremony the following evening we took home two trophies: Best Score / Special Effects and Second Place Overall. Footage from that film was used on the Travel Channel, where the couples were featured on a show focused on the RV lifestyle.

Adventure, Everyday documentary