When you're 25 years old, you have a secret (or not so secret) theory of what you might become, and where, and how. It's a naive theory, no doubt, but it has all the seductive power of the self-made myth. Your suspicions about yourself brim over, begging to be confirmed--and you have no evidence that they won't be confirmed. All you've got is a long swath of time and desire to imagine and seek out opportunities to be tested.

When you're 35 years old, things have changed. You've already tabled most of your spare time as a bargaining chip to try to negotiate your way into a serious relationship as well as something resembling a career. And it was worth it. Because you just aren't so interested anymore in spending much time thinking about the Theory of You. You tell yourself that you can't afford to navel-gaze, but that's not it. The hypothesis itself has changed. It's been falsified, at least in part, by your relentlessly unhypothetical life. And you don't necessarily feel all that good about it.

Well you should, because a 25-year-old's idea of who they will be is boldly, enthusiastically wrong. They will fire themselves off with great speed and intensity and it will all look very cool, but they won't have a clue what they're aiming at. Collateral damage abounds in those years, and friendly fire is a real problem. But you've been through this hail of random bullets and you're still standing. And in the future, you will choose your targets more carefully.

But what if there were an opportunity for you to have it both ways? To combine the benefits of experience with the urgency of innocence? I think there might just be such an opportunity in the 48-hour Toronto Film Challenge, and I invite you to join the 'die hard' team of creatives we're assembling for the attempt if you're still interested after reading how and why we're doing it.

The challenge is to make a film, from pre-production to post, in two days. At 7pm on a Friday you begin with cast, crew, equipment, and not a lick of dialogue. At 7pm on the following Sunday you must turn in a finished film. There will be no rough cut. There will be no reshoots. No weather delays. No lighting, costume, or prop delays. No script meetings (because in our case there will be no script). Walk in with yourself. Walk away with the actual film. Three days later, you're watching it in a public theatre.

It's an idea that has taken off in other cities around North America and has now come to Toronto. There has already been a 24-hour Challenge in April; the one we'll be competing in is the 48-hour Challenge in June. I won't go into a lot of background about the rules, because you can read them all here. The local organiser is a guy named J. Michael Dawson, whose L.I.F.T. bio page can be seen here.

I attended the 24-hour Film Challenge screenings with some friends. Most of the entries were failed experiments, which is what filmmaking is all about. What's interesting is the way they failed, by trying to hit all of the bases of making a film at about 10%, resulting in an overall 10% solution. It feels like you are being very ambitious but actually it results in sharp drop in expectations of everyone involved, and almost guarantees failure because as I've noted elsewhere, you just can't get away with a 10% solution when it comes to performance. But what would you have at the end of 48 hours if you decided to turn up the dial on performance to 80% or more, and just didn't really sweat the rest?

Sounds like a dodgy idea. Isn't the other stuff also important? I have learned as a writer that far from being thwarted by self-imposed limitations, art will often thrive on them. A carefully chosen omission can free what remains to occupy the canvas fully. And the careful omission that I propose to make is of the act of omission itself—editing. The ability to choose what you will omit from your film is very expensive in terms of time; doing it right could easily consume half of our precious 48. Rather than compromise the story for the sake of being able to mess around with it afterwards, I think the cagier option would be to just relinquish that control.

No editing. Shoot the whole thing in a single handheld take. Treat the camera as one of the actors. Don't plan the camera movements and rest points; instead, rehearse them. And rehearse them. And rehearse them. Until the best blocking for camera reveals itself. The beauty of it is that if we dispense with the final cut, we can also discard all of the usual prep time for lighting, costuming, and sound that gives filmmaking its reputation as an exercise in 'hurry up and wait'. I'll explain why in one of a series of further posts I am planning about the challenge. To keep up on the latest developments please bookmark my main log page.

For now, I would just like any of you who is interested in joining the team to add a comment to the bottom of this page announcing your availability. Please keep in mind that the rules dictate we cannot have more than 10 contestants (cast and crew), so don't be offended if you aren't ultimately chosen. We can't have 10 boom ops: we need to choose a complementary team oriented toward single-take filmmaking, so most selections will be practically driven. Besides, we may compete again, and your interest will be noted in any case, for future projects.