Move over Spielberg. Tufts students are now in the movie-making business. Thanks to Campus MovieFest (CMF), an annual event and the world's largest student film festival, amateur filmmakers at Tufts were given the tools necessary to create their very own short movie masterpieces.
The brainchild of former Emory student Vijay Makar, Campus MovieFest provides each student who signs up with an Apple laptop and camcorder. The contestants must scramble to translate a story concept into a five-minute feature film within just one week.
The movies are screened for a panel of ten people at each participating university, made up of a mixture of students and faculty. The panel contains individuals from various departments and majors to represent the audience watching the films on each campus, rather than a room full of Robert Eberts. The top 16 short films from each school involved in the Boston program are selected and screened at their respective universities for the campus community.
The driving inspiration and main idea behind the program is that "everybody has a story to tell," said Dan Costa, the manager of school partnerships for CMF. "We just give them the equipment and tools to do it."
When it first began seven years ago, Campus MovieFest involved just four students. Since then it has grown exponentially. The idea received an overwhelmingly enthusiastic response, spurring the expansion of the event to eight other campuses in Atlanta.
This year, forty schools - seven of which are located in Boston - participated in the movie-making madness throughout the year. This is the fourth year in which Boston schools, including Tufts, have been included in the event.
CMF at Tufts
Campus MovieFest initially approached TUTV this year in order to attract those students who had already demonstrated an interest in filmmaking at Tufts. Ultimately, through the hard work of freshman Barb Soleish, TUTV co-sponsored the event and sent senior Yuna Park and freshman Wyatt Newport to co-host the event. Soleish, the liaison between Tufts and CMF, was unable to make it to the showing, but Park and Newport hosted the red-carpet event as if it were a miniature Academy Awards in the packed Pearson classroom. Park's enthusiasm, paired with Wyatt's deadpan comments, made them an entertaining duo, and the two kept the audience laughing between films with a number of clever quips and asides.
Monday night marked the unveiling of the 16 short films chosen from the Tufts pool. Highlights of the evening covered a range of genres and styles.
Two of the films were library romances, which included the lighthearted "Red like a Book," chronicling one student's enjoyably awkward attempts to catch the attention of an attractive girl in Tisch Library. Apparently, though dedicated, some contestants were unable to completely sacrifice their study time.
More dramatic performances came from movies such as "Release," a story of the tragic actions of a widower, and "The Thin White Line," which can only be described as a gangster movie on the streets of Somerville.
Some students successfully mixed in animation. One student took a fall into a chalkboard for a musical adventure in "Dream Big," resulting in clever interactions with blackboard drawings. "Two Cock Thieves" was a crowd pleaser and involved, you guessed it, genitalia robbing banks. If the title sounds familiar, it's because it was a parody of "Two Chalk Theives," winner of the 2006 Tufts competition.
"Short Leash" kept students chuckling throughout a humorous parody of a "backstage look" at the dynamics of Tufts' own star musicians Ezra Furman and the Harpoons. Other pieces left a sweet aftertaste, most notably "Oh Darling," a charming look at love and family with nostalgic aged film and a soft soundtrack.
Park and Newport presented awards for Best Picture, Drama and Comedy, as well as an Audience Choice Award, voted in "American Idol-style," with students texting in their favorite film to be tallied later. Free iPod shuffles seemed to be handed out left and right to the winners, including opportunities for audience members to win a raffle. The winners were as follows:
Best Drama: "The Usual"
Freshman Justin Binder represented the makers of "The Usual" at the showing with classmates Jay Hennig and Alex Hoffman making up the rest of the team. All three are new to Campus Moviefest, but the novices pulled together a wonderfully quirky and well narrated short film. Their movie focuses on a man who leads a life of regularity and patterns and aspires to simply have a "usual" drink at his favorite coffee shop.
Binder recounted filming one scene that looked rather unusual to passerby on the Somerville streets.
"In the part where [Hoffman] is picking up lottery tickets off the ground and arranging them, we got a lot of weird looks from people nearby," he said. "We had no idea what we were doing since we're newto this."
Binder handled the music for the film while Hennig and Hoffman wrote and acted in it, respectively. Binder stressed that the experience was a great one despite their lack of filmmaking knowledge. He hopes they will participate again in the future.
Best Comedy: "Jenkem Gangster"
This outrageous comedy about students getting high from sniffing, well, feces was made by sophomores Alex Kahn, Kyle Halle-Erby and Mike Levine. It may surprise some that the inspiration behind their seemingly ludicrous concept is partly truth.
"A lot of people don't realize that jenkem is an actually issue," Halle-Erby said, jokingly referring to the hallucinogenic toxin found in some human waste. "We thought that maybe our film was more an awareness thing than a comedy ... should have been put in the social justice category!"
The team included an actual YouTube.com clip in the beginning from a newscast about the dangers of jenkem.
"We were going for a sort of 'American Gangster' [2007] or 'Scarface' [1983] spoof," Levine said.
Kahn particularly remembers one moment during the filming process involving a woman from OneSource walking in on their filming and the disaster of a bathroom set, which included a Kool-Aid and brownie mixture that was smeared all over the toilet seat.
"She came in and ... started screaming in Portuguese," he said. "I kept trying to calm her down and explain, but all I could do was point and say 'película' and 'no es real,' which clearly is Spanish, not Portuguese."
Tufts senior Ikenna Anyoku created the movie's soundtrack, an original called "Jenkem Rap," which his teammates said he threw together rather impressively at 4 a.m. in the Eaton Hall computer lab.
Best Picture: "Patron Addicted"
The winner of the Best Picture award went to a film entitled "Patron Addicted." The premise is relatively simple: A man with a fear of malls undergoes therapy, ultimately turning his fear into an obsession.
The film's narration, told entirely in rhyme sequences, made it stand out to judges. But the really exceptional aspect of "Patron Addicted" was the visual appeal of live-action animation in the style of "A Scanner Darkly" [2006]. According to junior Nick Stepro, who decided to try out frame-by-frame animation, the process took two full days - that's two all-nighters and 48 hours straight - of work to complete.
"We noticed that in this competition, the people with the best equipment tend to win all the time, so we wanted to do something that would improve the visual appeal of our movie," Stepro said.
Eventually, the team's hard work paid off, as the animation served as a major component of the film's fantastical tone.
A Grand Finale
"Every year, Tufts students come out with strong films ... they're having fun and learning about the technology that goes into making these movies," Costa said.
He expressed enthusiasm for the many veteran students are who have participated for several years, as well as first-time participants.
"It's really the best of both worlds," he said. "You get teams that are new to filming, and then a lot of people come back. You might have a team that participates for three consecutive years. Sometimes the first year their film doesn't get chosen to be shown, and the second year maybe it doesn't receive any awards. And then by the third year, they've been thinking about their movie and have an awesome idea that makes it very far in thecompetition."
The award winners and other finalists from the screening at Tufts will move onto the next round, judged by a group comprised of one or two students and one staff member from each university, as well as several Boston community members (such as representatives from the Boston Globe).
Between two and four films from each school will be chosen for the Campus MovieFest Grand Finale in Boston on Saturday, April 26th at the Colonial Theater.
