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“Sweet Angevine” was our entry for the Virginia Beach, 2007, ‘48 Hour Film Project’. This was the first year the ‘48 Hour Fest’ had come to Virginia Beach. Normally, I participated by joining up with the Star Wipe team and entering in the Washington DC or Baltimore festivals.

As it was a new city for the 48 hour, registration was discounted by $50, I believe. We also had an additional rule: You must showcase a distinguishable, major, local landmark. This was added in so that they could ensure that all teams were actually filming in Virginia Beach. We met the rule by photographing our actors at The Cavalier Hotel, a well-known local hotel at the Oceanfront, famous (at least locally) for it’s urban legends of being haunted. The photo was then used in a scene as a prop.

To be honest, looking back, this isn’t one of the greatest projects I ever worked on. Don’t get me wrong, we had quite a lot of talented people, a larger number on our team than what I could have thrown together. In fact, we had so many people that we had “too many cooks in the kitchen” during pre-production. We had little writing teams coming up with scripts. The whole group became so split on what to actually make that we ultimately didn’t have any script done until the afternoon of day 2. We essentially made our film in 24 hours.

All those talented people aside, I feel that the end product was actually sub-par to what we really could have done, but we were short on time. That being said, we still managed to pull off 2nd best film AND the awards for: