The 24 Hour Film Challenge

Most short films never get made. Or at least, never get finished. Whilst the cost of digital film-making equipment has plummeted even faster than its quality has risen, one fact remains: time is still money. When you're putting together your magnum opus at weekends, having to wait on the availability of family and friends to provide you with favours and wanting to fiddle with the editing until you've got all those cross-fades, whip-pans and reverse dolly shots slotting together like a well-oiled jigsaw, it's easy to let things to drag on to the point where you forget why you wanted to make the thing in the first place. And then not bother. But what if you didn't have time? What if whatever you started had to be finished by exactly the same time tomorrow, or else?

On Saturday May 10, fifty caffeine-crazed film crews from all over the country will descend on Hoodtown in an ultimate battle to prove who has the shiniest, swiftest cinematic ninja skills. There are two catches: if their final efforts come in even a second over the three minute mark they'll be instantly disqualified, and they have just 24 short hours to shoot, edit and process their mini-masterpieces.

The event's been organised by the good people at BritFilms, in association with notorious guerrilla filmmaker and film challenge guru Johnny Oddball. BritFilms is a Nottingham based website which doesn't just review movies and keep you up to date with everything that's new on the silver screen, it's one of the best place on the net to see new short films too, especially their Made in the Midlands section, featuring a whole host of local talent making movies on location in England's midriff.

Here at LeftLion, we're big fans of theirs, and we decided this idea was too exciting not to spend a full rotation of the Earth documenting in full. We'll be on the scene for the whole long haul with one lucky film crew, bringing you all the dizzying coffee highs and terrifying blood sugar crashes live, as they happen. Then (after a brief rest for sleep/food/psychiatric counselling) we'll be smuggling our e-mail enabled camera phones into the gala screening at the Cornerhouse's glamorous and exclusive Cineworld Cinema to find out whether our chosen crew can triumph in the evening's final award ceremony. It promises to be the longest Saturday night and Sunday morning in LeftLion's journalistic history. Who will survive, and what will be left of them? Join us here from 10:00am on Saturday 10 May and find out...