Mick McCleery's video: A HEDGE BACKWARDS 2014 - a 48 hour film project Philadelphia PA

Winner - Audience Choice Award Winner - Best Special Effects Winner - 2nd Runner Up Nominated - Best Actor Nominated - Best Use of Character Required Elements (Philadelphia 48 hour Film Project - 2014) Genre: Time Travel Character: Victor Chesterfield - Hedge Fund Manager Prop: Flowers Line of Dialogue: "That looks like fun.” THE PLOT: An inept time traveler encounters unexpected problems on what should be a routine trip to the past. “It’ll clip your hedges (if you know what I mean)” THE STORY (behind the movie): Only 1 week after we participated in Buffalo’s 48-hour Project we jumped into Philly. Billy Franks was again on board though would be in London while we would be setting up ‘home base’ at my house in Haddon Heights, NJ. We drew ‘Time Travel’ for our genre and were certainly inspired by the required character and their job - ‘Victor Chesterfield - Hedge Fund Manager’. Our twist is we decided that in the future maybe a hedge fund manager was a bit different from what they are today. It was decided that Billy and his British accent would make a fine Victor and that the futuristic setting of the film would allow him (and others) to ‘video call in’ to the various scenes. I don't remember too much about our story conferences but did recall Billy first suggested the title ‘A Hedge Backwards’. Gary, Mike, and I didn’t really get on board with it right away. Billy explained that it's a saying in the UK - ‘you look like you were drug through a hedge backwards’ basically meaning ‘you are having a bad hair day’. The title quickly grew on us as it featured the word ‘hedge’ which referred to the required job and the word ‘backwards’ which worked as the time travel element, Now it's one of my fave titles that we have ever used and I couldn’t imagine it being anything other than that. TECHNICAL STUFF: This would be our first movie shot on a DSLR (one of the Canon ones) and as I was doing the main acting part Gary shot the bulk of it. Also had lots and lots of special effects where I would export one frame of video to Gary and he would put that in photoshop and erase the background and then give it back to me as a png file. I love all of that flying around! REFLECTION: A couple of things do stand out. The first is a memory of how nice a weekend it was. Typically when we make these movies it’s a super hot and humid summer weekend. This time though the weather was beautiful. Even had the house windows open as we didn’t need the air conditioning on. It was also the first one of these flicks that we didn't need to leave even once you shoot anywhere other than my house. We remarked on how smoothly things went when you didn’t need to cart everyone off to set up shop at some other location. Since then we’ve done our best to limit travel times as it seriously eats into the 48-hour limit! THINGS TO FIX: Just watching some parts now with headphones on and heard in at least one scene (in the bed with Mike) the dialogue is only on one side. Easy enough to fix and I guess we just didn’t notice it back then. We lame! m mccleery (2/14/23)