IFP 2025 “Beat The Clock” 48-Hour Film Challenge Submission – “Angel”

643 Productions participated in the IFP Phoenix 2025 “Beat the Clock” 48 Hour Film Challenge this year. In 2023, Ding Dong won 2nd Place Overall as well as Best Directing, Best Editing, and Best Cinematography. This year, the stakes are raised with a total of 52 teams competing and two days for showing rather than one.

Friday night we were given the following line “Life is like ____” and directed to have either a box or ice cream as a prop in the film. The writing team got to it and the final version of the script was finished around 1am. I went to bed around midnight right as they were finishing up and then got up at 4am to start shotlisting. I got to a Starbucks around 5 and finished the Shotlist at 7am, heading straight to the first location in downtown Phoenix to start building the camera at 7:30am. We had 4 locations planned for the day: Parking Lot for Car Shots, Gas Station, Recording Studio, and House.

We got started on the first shot around 8:45am after getting makeup, camera, and audio all set. We wrapped the car shots around 11am and arrived at the gas station around 11:30am. We moved quick and left the gas station at 12:45pm to get to the recording studio location at 1:15pm. Here we had majority of the shots and more cars than we probably should have been able to fit in the parking lot. To top it off, one of the cars batteries died right when they were heading to go get lunch for us all (Costco Pizza saved us). We wrapped at the studio location at 5:30pm then drove an hour over to a house in Chandler. Thank you so much to Ashley Rene and her parents for letting us use their home.

We got to the home around 6:30pm and got started on the bedroom scene while the director and audio team worked with the Cale on the off screen voice overs. The sun came down just in time for us to film the night scene in the pool at 8pm. We wrapped completely with the martini shot at 9:15pm. We packed up and was out of there around 10:30pm to get the footage over to the editor and then backed up on our NAS.

Post production took all day and was a team effort between the Elliot, Sean and I. We were in constant back and forth communication with the composer, graphics and vfx guys and it required precise organization and a fast internet connection to constantly move all of the footage between each party. We were thankfully able to upload the film at 6:50pm, only to realize we uploaded the version without the score. We quickly we filled out the form and uploaded the correct version and got a second submission in right before the deadline. We explained the two submissions in an email with IFP and they thanked us for the clarification. Now that it was complete, we uploaded it unlisted to YouTube and went over to Andrew’s house for a wrap party and premiered it to the cast and crew.

Logline: A lonely business woman finds a radio hosts that meets her inner needs, inspiring her to take what is hers