A team of Tufts students received national recognition for its film "From the Fryer to the Freeway: Alternative Energy Today," taking third place for best documentary in this year's College Television Awards.
The competition is administered by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Foundation, one of the three foundations that run the Emmy Awards.
The students created the film for their fall Experimental College class, "Producing Films for Social Change," taught by Professor Roberta Oster-Sachs.
The 12-minute film examines "the issue of waste vegetable oil as a potential fuel alternative," said senior Emi Norris, who produced the film along with senior Phil Martin, senior Assaf Pines and freshman Sean Malahy.
Norris received a call from the Academy three weeks ago to inform her that her film had won third place. "We submitted to so many festivals, [at first] I didn't know which one it was," she said.
She received an e-mail on Feb. 8 officially announcing the award. Then, she saw that the email address included "@emmy.org."
"That's when I got excited," Norris said.
Norris was the first to tell Oster-Sachs about the award.
"Honestly, I was stunned," Oster-Sachs said. "Most of the winners are from schools with large film programs, like NYU or UCLA."
All four of the student documentaries from Oster-Sachs' fall class were entered in this contest.
"We just sent them in... not really with high expectations," Oster-Sachs said.
This was the first time that Tufts students had submitted their work for the College Television Award.
Martin and Norris will fly to Los Angeles to attend the black-tie College Emmy Awards ceremony on Sunday, Mar. 19.
According to the academy's Web site, the event is usually "attended by more than 400 industry people, including Academy members and governors, students, academics and the press." Past participants include James Earl Jones, Tim Allen, and Roger Ebert.
The Academy pays for one producer and one guest to attend. The pair will accept a $500 prize on behalf of the team and will attend the film festival at the Goldenson Theatre in North Hollywood the following day.
"They have a chance to showcase their work to an audience of Hollywood bigwigs, it's possible that our students could get discovered," Oster-Sachs said, "And I don't think I'm stretching...to say that."
At the screening, a montage version of the students' film will be shown.
According to a Tufts press release yesterday, "this year, the Academy received more than 450 submissions from 39 universities across the US. 'From the Fryer to the Freeway' was selected as a winner in the documentary category that received over 100 entries."
The documentary shows Hampshire College senior Joey Carey, Brookline's 3rd Annual AltWheels Alternative Transportation Festival participant Warren Wein, and Tufts freshman Alexandra McGourty using alternative methods to fuel their vehicles.
Carey acquired a kit from Greasecar Vegetable Fuel Systems that allowed him to modify his car's engine to run on filtered vegetable oil as well as gasoline.
McGourty learned to collect oil, filter it, and use it as fuel in the diesel engine of a 1983 Mercedes for her high school science fair project. The documentary shows her collecting used oil from McDonald's fryers.
Norris said that at the AltWheels Festival, Wein showed off his car engine that was converted to run on oil collected from Chinese restaurants. Like McGourty, Wein filters the oil at home.
"We liked the juxtaposition of the characters," Norris said, "as well as the difference in their personalities."
"I think that's why the film worked...we were able to reach a wide audience."
Norris said that the team found McGourty by searching through students' interests on Facebook, and they found Carey through a friend.
The documentary also included the conflicting opinions of two experts, Professor Bruce Everett from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Professor Michael Klare from Hampshire College.
According to Norris, Everett, an economist who teaches a course entitled "Petroleum in the Global Economy," argued against the viability of waste vegetable oil as an energy resource.
He feels that it is "neither feasible nor desirable for the US to become energy independent," Norris said.
Klare is the author of "Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum."
Klare thinks that energy independence would be beneficial for the United States because it will decrease economic dependence on the Middle East.
Oster-Sachs thought that this academic debate gave the documentary a competitive edge.
"A good film has to have some kind of an edge," she said.
Oster-Sachs said that this documentary was different from the films typically selected for college Emmys, as it was an analytical work without emotionally charged plot.
"I was impressed that the academy chose a film that was really a social action kind of film," she said.
"From the Fryer to the Freeway," may also be screened at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regional office in Boston in the coming weeks.
After the award was announced, senior Chelsea Bardot, an intern under Tom D'Avanzo at the EPA, told D'Avanzo about the documentary, who subsequently viewed it and decided to try to screen it at his office.
Bardot guessed that the screening would take place in April, and would be "aimed towards the [almost 700] employees there."
"It's pretty exciting that already it's generating a buzz," Oster-Sachs said. "I'm so proud of them."
As a former television producer, Oster-Sachs emphasized how happy she is to see a liberal arts institution support media literacy and film production.
Julie Dobrow, Program Director of Communications and Media Studies, was likewise impressed by the project and said that it "reflects the quality" of Tufts students that they were able to compete so seriously with students from large film schools.
The only other award a film from Oster-Sachs' class has won was the privilege of being screened at the Brandeis New England Film Festival in the fall of '04. That film was a documentary on pollution in the Mystic River.
