Celery Punches, Pizza Chaos At Short Film Contest

Haley Copes needed 30 seconds of chaos on camera, so she told everyone at Christy’s Irish Pub on Orange Street to run and scream as if pizza had gone extinct.

Ryan Licwinko needed that perfect sound effect for a punch landing during a martial arts fight, so he rolled up a newspaper and smacked a bunch of celery.

Copes and Licwinko aren’t avant-garde performance artists simply looking for the next eccentric thing to do.

Rather, they’re two of 31 filmmakers who participated in last weekend’s 48 Hour Film Project (48HFP) New Haven, the eighth annual local competition to write, shoot, edit and produce a four-to-seven-minute movie that abides by a range of playful, arbitrary criteria.

Copes and Licwinko and 48HFP city producer Trish Clark came on this week’s episode of WNHH’s ​“Deep Focus” to talk about their experience hustling to make a complete short movie during this year’s competition, and about the creative expediencies that emerge when you only have two days to work with.

Required Elements

All 31 teams that competed in this year’s event convened at the Rough Draft in Hamden on July 27 to learn about the required elements that each team would have to include in its final film.

Clark said that those required elements were a character named Martin or Maureen Nutmeg, who had to be a liar; a children’s book; and the line, ​“Where have I heard that before?”

Each participating team also had to pick between two genres drawn from a hat.

Licwinko, who has participated in the 48HFP for five years in a row with his team everyoneleavesnewhaven, chose the genres Road Movie and Martial Arts Movie.

“I was immediately drawn to martial arts,” he said. After making so many martial arts movies as a kid, he said that genre was a natural pick.

His team’s movie, ​“The Warrior, The Guardian, and The Liar,” wound up telling the story of a lone warrior, her wise but cryptic sensei, and a high-kicking villain who guards the covered bridge in East Rock Park right next to the Eli Whitney Museum on Whalley Avenue.

Copes, who was participating in the competition for the second year in a row but for the first time as a team leader with her group Bounce Lounge Productions, drew the genres Comedy and Disaster.

After calling Clark’s 48HFP hotline on the way home from the Rough Draft to confirm that mockumentary qualifies as comedy, Copes decided to make a movie that fit into both of the selected genres.

Her team’s movie, ​“A Slice of Chaos,” followed an intrepid local reporter in her quest to figure out why New Haven had suddenly lost all of its pizza, a development that had sent the pizza-crazed residents of this imaginary Elm City into a desperate frenzy.

The Sound Of Celery

For Licwinko, the big challenge of the weekend came in pulling off the fight scene on the East Rock bridge.

“I didn’t want it to look too amateurish,” Licwinko said. ​“But we really didn’t know any fight choreographers.”

But then a friend of a friend came through. Licwinko was able to convince Laura Bass, a local dancer who had done some taekwondo and fight choreography, to serve as both the team’s martial arts expert and to play the role of the movie’s villain.

Working around the limited angles available in the narrow, covered bridge, Licwinko and Bass were able to put together a fight scene replete with close ups of the fighters’ feet sprinting towards one another, head-on shots of fists punching towards the camera, and low-angle shots of each fighter flying backwards into the air after being subject to a particularly effective kick.

“I’m not sure we got out of amateurish,” he said with a smile. ​“But we tried.”

One additional trick that Licwinko’s team employed to add that extra oomph to the fight sequence came after the fighting itself, when Licwinko was thinking of the perfect sound effect for fist and foot colliding with body.

“We did a classic foley effect,” he said. They bought a bunch of celery and a newspaper, rolled up the newspaper, and smacked the celery.

True enough, as the two fighters duke it out on the bridge, every punch or kick that lands give off a crisp, crinkly pop. No bruises in sight.

Licwinko said his team considered adding a post-script to the movie that explained that no celery was hurt in the making of the movie.

“But that would have been a bold-faced lie,” he said.

“A happy epilogue to that story,” he said. ​“The celery was turned into a wonderful soup by Jessica, our caterer.”

Pizza Chaos

Copes, who studies video production at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU), said that she and her teammates figured out pretty quickly after drawing their genre and required elements that they wanted to make a mockumentary about a suddenly pizza-less New Haven.

But now she had to find a group of people willing to run screaming through the streets for the movie’s opening montage of the city’s post-pizza descent into chaos. Copes knew just where to turn.

A bartender at the Downtown Irish pub Christy’s, Copes said she showed up to her workplace on the Saturday night of the competition and started yelling for fellow staff, regular customers, and anyone else who might be interested to create a bit of a flash mob on the street outside of the bar.

“Guys, New Haven is out of pizza,” she said to spur on the anguish. ​“There’s no Pepe’s! There’s no Modern! You can’t even get Domino’s. You can’t get bagel bites. What are we gonna do? Ok. 3 2 1. Run in the streets!”

Enough people complied, and she was able to get her shot. Throughout the weekend, she traveled from Downtown to Coogan Pavilion to Elm Street to piece together her story of a pizza-less New Haven and a fictional former mayor named Tony Pepperoni who may or may not have been responsible for the sudden culinary disappearance.

“It was so humbling, all of the people who pulled through at the last minute,” Copes said.

Licwinko agreed, summing up his time working on the 48HFP this year as ​“a very intense but a very satisfying experience.”

All 31 of the 48 Hour Film Project New Haven entries screened at the Bijou Theatre in Bridgeport on Wednesday night. Clark will host a subsequent screening of the 10 or 12 finalists, based on judges’ votes and audience favorites, at the Bijou on Aug. 24. Click here to learn more about upcoming screenings.

Click on the audio player or Facebook Live video below to listen to the complete interview.