Since 2002, the international filmmaking movement Kino has been thriving in Madison's Wis-Kino chapter. During the organizations 48-Hour Kabaret participants have 48 hours to write, shoot, and edit a short film.

Several Dane101 contributers decided the best way to understand the Wis-kino experience was to participate in it. On Friday evening, Adam Schabow made it to the kickoff meeting for Wis-kino's Spring Kabaret. In a departure from prior years, instead of a shared theme for all the films each team got their own challenge prop.

After breakfast this morning, Adam, Jesse Russell, Erin Rasmussen, Beth Morgan, and I started working on our film. We started shooting around nine AM and, unburdened by a script, had about half an hour of footage by eleven. As soon as we could get back to Adam's place, he, Jesse, and I started editing our film. Merely creating a film in a day wasn't enough for us, so we had the additional challenge of learning how to use the software to do so. We installed a five year old copy of Final Cut Express and captured the movie from the video camera.

The initial ordering of scenes wasn't too hard, but the rough product was twelve minutes of film -- more than double the five minute limit. The process of pruning scenes down, cutting away enjoyable but unessential parts, was painful and gave me a greater understanding of the conflicts you hear about between directors and studios that eventually result in directors' cuts of films being available. After we had the right amount of material, it was a couple more hours work to polish the transitions between scenes and add titles, credits, and music. At seven, we thought we were done. Due in no small part to our inexperience, the final step of getting our movie from my computer onto a DVD took another hour and a half.

Start to end, it took us about twelve hours to create a five minute short. Regardless of the outcome, the process was a whole lot of fun, and we're looking forward to Wis-kino's next event.

You can see many local filmmakers' efforts at the Sundance Cinema, 7:00 p.m. on Sunday, April 20. For those who don't make it, Dane101's film will be available online later this week.