The Missouri Theater was home to MU’s first ever Campus Movie Fest on April 26. The festival challenged students to create a short film in one week. They provided all the equipment necessary with no cost, from cameras to laptops with editing software. The participants had seven days to write, produce and edit a movie no longer than five minutes.
A meeting where the contest rules and schedule were presented was held on April 17, and the film needed to be turned in the following Tuesday, on April 24. During this week, the students needed to balance classes and filmmaking. The festival also had a video manager available at all times to help students with any equipment doubts or problems they might face.
“It didn’t feel like enough time and mind you, I didn’t waste any time,” sophomore Shelby Perry said. Perry wrote and directed the movie “Fatal Mistake.”
“The meeting was on Tuesday and we got the equipment on Wednesday; that night, I taught myself all the equipment because we began filming on Thursday and I had to know that camera backwards and forwards,” Perry said.
The films were then judged by an anonymous panel of faculty and students, all representatives of MU. Thirty films were submitted, but only 16 could be chosen and screened on the night of the fest. The top four are going to the national competition, the Terminus Festival, in Atlanta, Georgia. They can also apply to the Campus Movie Fest’s Cannes program, which takes 45 students every year to watch their movie screened at the Cannes Festival in France. This year, the top 25 national movies will also be streamed on Amazon Prime.
The theater was mainly occupied by young filmmakers; they found out if their movie was chosen or not during the screenings. In spite of the pressure and tight deadline, many of the students were really happy with their work and their teams. One of them was Alex Hausman, winner of the award for best performance of the night for his acting in the short “In This Car.”
“I do a lot of comedy writing, and he approached me with such a dark subject matter,” Hausman said about the director Kendrick Smith. “I knew this was gonna be a challenge, but I also know that Kendrick is a fantastic director because we work together a lot.”
“In This Car” was also one of the top four films of the night. It had a team of six people, which was the average for the fest.
“It’s easy to do films like this and make quality work when you have a great group of people to work with,” Solomon Henderson, who also worked in the short “In This Car,” said. “The team made it super easy to show up on set, get together and do projects like this. The mood is light and we all have one mindset.”
The participants also highlighted the positive impact that the time restraints had on the quality of their productions and how they learned from the challenge that Campus Movie Fest presented.
“It showed us that you can write a script, make it and edit it, get the whole thing done, in a small amount of time and [with] very few resources,” Ryan Silver, who worked on the film “Bobby,” said. “Not only was it fun to collaborate together, but it was a very good learning experience that will apply to future projects. It made it more important to not really spend a lot of time trying to get that perfect shot. It was a worthwhile challenge.”
_Edited by Alexandra Sharp | asharp@themaneater.com_