How our Video Producer Diana Peters Created a Short Film in 48 Hours

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This past September, I had the opportunity to participate in Chicago’s Official 48 Hour Film Competition 2024, and my first ever 48 hour project. As the name implies, 48 hour film requires entrants to create a film (maximum of 7 minutes) in just two days/48 hours, and usually involves being randomly assigned a genre, the name of a character, a quote, prop, or some other required visual detail.

When I first heard about the concept of a 48 hour film project, I knew it was something I needed to try at least once in my life. Creating a 48 hour film was actually a mini-unit in one of my core film classes back in college, but I ultimately wasn’t able to participate due to getting the flu during competition weekend, so this was certainly a long-awaited goal.

A couple months before the competition, my dear friend and talented animator/filmmaker Olivia Moon asked me to participate with her group, and I couldn’t have said yes fast enough. We named our team Broaden Films, with a letter representing our group members first-name initials.

The competition kicked off on the night of September 27, when we were randomly given our genre – horror. I was elated at this news! Horror is my personal favorite genre, and I find it so fun to play with horror tropes and audience expectations as a storyteller. We threw around countless ideas before I suggested that we make a film about a MLM/pyramid scheme gone wrong, with a bit of a Stepford Wives-inspired twist, and that’s what we ran with. We named our film Tradknives.

The other requirements that all of the films had to follow were as follows:

-We had to have the line, “I’ve been waiting for this”

-Character named Aunt Amy and/or Uncle Alex

-Business card as a prop

I spent that Friday night co-writing the project with my friend and talented writer, Nathan Moon. We quickly found a co-writing process that was very efficient and played to our strengths as writers. Meanwhile, our other group members began to gather costumes and props, while Olivia worked on our poster. By midnight, we had a script we felt good about, and we were ready to shoot bright and early Saturday morning, with the actors beginning to memorize as soon as we sent the scripts out.

In addition to co-writing the script, I also served as director and DP on the film. Being both director and DP required a lot of multitasking and focus on all visual and narrative elements, but given that the whole team was so focused and prepared in their roles, it made my work on set that much smoother.

One goal I had for shooting the project was to attempt to capture a smooth tracking shot by filming hand-held on my roller skates. We actually ended up having the perfect circumstances and weather to make this shot fit for our film, and it’s by far the most fun camera work I’ve ever done. Roller skating is my biggest passion outside of filmmaking, so it was a dream to blend the two and use it to create a very smooth shot of our lead actress, Erika Oesau, running for her life.

We spent all day Saturday shooting, then Olivia stayed up most of Saturday night editing. I jumped in to help finish the edit on Sunday morning and afternoon, while Nathan edited the sound mix. We used one royalty-free song, and I scored the rest of the project myself, which was a fun challenge as I am still fairly new to composing digital music.

Making any piece of art that you’re truly proud of within a 48 hour span alone can be challenging, and filmmaking as a medium typically demands a lot of time, care, and attention, especially if you are hoping to make something actually watchable and worth your effort.

In the world of narrative filmmaking, it’s common to spend months in post-production to edit, fine-tune, color-grade, and have music created for your projects. I was surprised to find a sense of liberation in this short production timeline; you know you have to surrender control after your time runs out, so you have to commit wholly to what you and your team create in the moment.

There was something very freeing about just doing your very best in the time you have, and then letting your work out into the world to speak for itself. I also really do believe that pressure can create ‘diamonds’ with the right circumstances and collaborators. I was so lucky for my group being endlessly creative, skilled in their roles, and working symbiotically toward a shared vision.

All of the teams had their films screened in several screening groups on Monday October 7th at the Davis Theater in Chicago. We were in the top 3 audience favorite films of our screening group, and just a few weeks later, we received the news that we’d get to screen our film at The Music Box Theater in Chicago for the main competition. Though we didn’t come away winning any awards, Nathan and I felt very honored to receive a nomination for Best Writing.

So many incredible and diverse filmmakers, writers, actors, and artists participated in this year’s festival, and it was so inspiring to see what the other teams were hard at work on in the same 48 hour window as us. There is so much to be learned by basically speed-running a short film production, and I cannot wait for my next one!