What's a Crazy 8s?

Pi Day is being made as part of the Crazy 8s short film competition.

"What's a Crazy 8s short film competition?" You say. Well, I'm glad you asked! *ahem*

Crazy 8s is a short film competition that runs with 8 as a theme. 8 filmmakers get 8 days to make a short film (under 10 minutes) with 800 bucks. They used to also give the filmmakers 800 feet of film stock, which works about to about 20 minutes worth of stock, but in this modern age of miniDV and HD, they give you 30 minutes of tape stock.

To be selected, you have to pitch, and they had 60 people come in over two days and pitch their story ideas to a judging panel of 7 local film industry pros. You can see a short clip of my pitch on the winner's announcement podcast on the Crazy 8s website (www.crazy8s.cc).

Now that we've all been selected, we get a story meeting with some professional story editors (and hosted by the CBC here in Vancouver), a camera package, several thousand dollars in grip/lighting gear, and a sweet-ass venue to screen our finished shows.

We have from April 17th to the 24th to complete the films, and the screening is on the 26th. This is an amazing opportunity for me (and the others, of course), and I'm quite honored to be a part of it. 

I'm also terrified. There's a whole lot to do and two weeks to do it. Right now, I'm the one-man show. Hopefully I'll get my crew together sooner than later and then things should start to fall into place.

Wish me luck.

P.S. Check out the Crazy 8s website for more deets (as the kids say these days). They also do their own podcasts, which are worth a look.