Students, faculty prepare to partake in yearly film festival
By J.T. Buchheit, copy editor, jbuchhei@jccc.edu
Students who think they have what it takes to produce a superb film are getting an opportunity to show their stuff at the annual Take 5 Film Fest on Thursday, April 2.
“What the [festival] is all about is students being able to exhibit the works that they’ve worked on in classes around the area, from high schools and here from the college as well,” said event organizer and journalism professor Joe Petrie.
Students will be able to enter films in any of five genres: Sci-Fi, Documentary, Narrative, Animation and original music video. The video must not be more than five minutes long, and a student may submit a maximum of five entries.
“I’m going to enter a music video,” said student Branden “Fozzie” Davidson. “It’s an original piece written by my brother. It’s a rap video with a comedic twist to it, and I edited it and shot it and directed the film itself.”
The festival has recently become more than just showing students’ films, however; there are also opportunities for students to learn more about making videos.
“The Take 5 Film Festival used to be the Cavalier Film Festival, which was where we showed a number of works from students in video production,” said Petrie. “We would give out awards for four different categories. But we didn’t get as much participation as we would’ve liked and not a great turnout in the evening, so we decided to move it to the daytime and make it more of a full learning experience for students.”
There are five workshop sessions that students can go to in order to gain more knowledge from experts about producing films. The workshops are movie makeup, shooting high-speed action, DSLR shooting, lighting, FX editing as well as preproduction scripting, storyboarding and line producing. One person interested in the workshop sessions is journalism instructor and first-time event organizer Adam Stephenson.
“I want to see how the students react to the workshops,” said Stephenson. “Watching them take in the information that these professionals have and just hearing the questions that they have to ask, because a lot of times, these kinds of events inspire the students to actually make a career out of it.”
Although Stephenson has never been involved in the Take 5 Film Festival before, he has been interested in the field for quite a while.
“I’ve always loved going to film festivals, especially when I was a student,” said Stephenson. “In fact, one of my wife and I’s favorite things to do every year is go to the Silent Film Festival in Topeka. So I’ve gone to film festivals before, but this is my first time actually being involved with the nitty-gritty, behind-the-scenes part of a film festival.”
Students and organizers alike are excited for the festival to take place, and many of the students are eager to show off the films they made and learn more about their potential careers.