Every month this year, I’m trying something new and documenting how it went. Check out what I’ve done in past months here. This month: experiencing the exhaustion of a 48-hour film festival, island camping, and a note about this summer.

Hello from the other side of another month in 2018. (Is it just me, or is this year flying? Also, that was an unintentional Adele reference. My brain just latches onto such things.)

May has been pretty wonderful. I’ve been gearing up for an extended trip this summer (more on that in a second), and I’ve spent weekends staying up late to make a short film and driving long hours up to Maine.

Interested in either of those experiences? Let’s dive in:

1. The 48-Hour Film Festival

48 Hour Film Project travels to many cities around the country to create opportunities for teams to write, shoot, and edit their own movies in the span of one weekend. This month, the festival came to Boston, and some friends I work with roped me into joining their group to create a short film.

I’m big on sleep, but I’m willing to sacrifice a little bit for the sake of being creative. Thus, on Friday night, I drove up to Nashua, NH to start the long process of putting together a movie in 48 short hours.

How it works is that the organizers provide two genres to choose from – in our case, comedy or coming-of-age. Every group ended up going with comedy, because everyone wants to think they’re funny. Myself included.

There are a few other requirements to include in your film, as well: a specific prop (a flower), a character name (Thelma or Thudd Taylor), and a specific line (“Let me think.”)

A few highlights:

• Standing in a field for a few hours with giant camera setups while a children’s birthday party raged behind us. Number of friendly dogs appreciated: 2. Number of crying kids: at least 1.

• Chick-fil-a breakfast, duh.
• Trying to read my laptop with the glare of the sun to figure out what scene we were on.

• Lunch break for tacos. It was Cinco de Mayo, after all.
• Standing on my tiptoes to turn a spotlight on at precisely the right moment, 6 or 7 times.
• An adorable baby who starred in our opening scene.
• A very hip cafe in Nashua with all your paleo/gluten-free/vegan needs that gave us shelter when it started pouring on Sunday.

• The back of my head makes an appearance. Please contact my agent for future requests.

And, of course, ending up with a fully-fledged short film was pretty cool.

The verdict: it was super fun, and I would do it again. Though next time, I’d recommend assigning each group member very specific roles to avoid too many cooks in the kitchen, as they say.

2. Acadia National Park

I hope to do a post dedicated to Acadia in the near future, but since it was my first visit there and thus a new national park for me, I figured it should be included in this wrap-up.

This trip also included camping (and some short backpacking) on an island,  another new thing for me.

Suffice to say that Acadia is beautiful and everyone should go there. Here are some photos to prove it:

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Finally, about that summer trip I’ve been frantically buying gear for all month…starting next week, I’ll be flying out west to start prepping and training to lead backpacking trips for high schoolers this summer. I’ll be in the woods for most of the months of June and July – which means the blessing and curse of little internet service. Stay tuned for a more comprehensive post on my plans for the blog during this time.

As always, thanks for reading – and happy June!