Ready, set, film

It's not often you start the weekend with a mission, but a few dozen people in Cape Girardeau and Paducah, Ky., spent the 48 hours between Friday and Sunday night making a movie that may bring them fame.

The Paducah 48-Hour Film Project operates like the more than 90 other events across the world. Filmmakers have 48 hours to write, film, edit and deliver a seven-minute movie.

The groups pluck a genre from a bucket. Choices range from drama to comedy to buddy film, which was the pull of Doctor Deuce Productions from Cape Girardeau, the only local team to participate.

To ensure teams create the movie in the set 48 hours, at the start of the weekend organizers announce a line, a prop and a character that must be included. With that information, 14 teams started on stories.

Driving home, members of Doctor Deuce tossed out ideas and tried to form something concrete. The character was a detective named Tyler Shatternick, which made my pals at Doctor Deuce cringe. Their genre -- buddy film -- could so easily turn into a buddy cop film.

Having done an outlandish comedy for the St. Louis 48-HFP, they wanted something more linear. One of them had said the worst thing that could happen would be for those in the car to come up with one thing and those waiting in Cape Girardeau to have something completely different.

Comedy buddy movie, meet thriller buddy movie.

The team -- Nick Steimle, Brandon Drury, Chase Wright, Jason Gibson, Ben Sample, Brandon Lohmeier and Scott Elsey -- have all done the 48-HFP before. Acting, shooting and editing come quickly. The hardest part is fine-tuning the story, especially if there are two separate ideas.

But a decision was made. The movie got done -- quite nicely, I'll add -- and submitted on time to the folks at Maiden Alley Cinema in Paducah.

Maiden Alley will screen the films Tuesday and Thursday, when they'll also give out the awards. Winner of Best Film will be entered in a competition in Las Vegas in the spring, where the top prize is a trip to the Cannes Film Festival.

Prizes aside, the weekend turns into a creative outlet, time with friends and an incentive to actually finish a project. Good luck to the guys in the group. Anyone want to carpool to Paducah on Thursday?