Ever wanted to make a movie? How about doing so in only two hours? That was the task given to participants in the Xtreme Filmmaker's Challenge last weekend. Hosted by the University's Filmmaker's Society, the event gave beginning student filmmakers a chance to write, direct, shoot and produce their own films with only two hours of camera time.
"This is one of our opening events of the year, to get people excited [about filmmaking]," President Dan Quinn said.
At the start of the Xtreme Filmmaker's Challenge, students gathered outside Clemons Library and were put into teams composed of all different levels of filmmaking experience. A member of the Filmmaker's Society Executive Board was present in each group to help serve as a mentor and guide students through the techniques of the filmmaking process, Quinn explained.
"With four to five people per team, everyone got to touch the camera, and everyone got to act," he said.
"We provide the cameras and equipment for the event," Vice President Hannah Chipman stated in an e-mail. "The films themselves are really up to the teams - we try to give the props and lines of dialogue as a jumping-off point for ideas, but after that, it's very open-ended. The mentors for each group, after the camera tutorial, are 'hands off' for shooting."
In addition to the time limit, part of the challenge is that all the groups are assigned a prop and a line of dialogue that must be included in the films. This year, the prop was a bunch of bananas and the line was "No experience necessary," Chipman noted. Participants had two hours of camera time to shoot the films and then worked with their FMS mentors to edit the footage in time for the event's film screening Tuesday night, Chipman said.
For some participants, the greatest challenge was not just working with the time constraints, but also writing their own piece. "Coming up with an interesting and unique story" was a challenge that second-year College student Yi Li said her group faced. Her group used the idea of "banana phones" in their short film that was entitled "Phonin' It In," Li said. While her group worked with the time crunch, she noted that her group had just enough time to shoot their film.
"I was actually pretty surprised," she said. "We finished it 30 minutes in advance."
Like many of the event's participants, Li noted that her group did not have any previous filmmaking experience.
Helping beginning filmmakers gain experience and access to filmmaking techniques is an important part of the Xtreme Filmmaker's Challenge.
"Our main goal is to get people who are interested in film to dive head-first into making a short film," Chipman said. "We find that people who are interested in moviemaking are sometimes hesitant to get projects off the ground because they are intimidated by the cameras or by the process."
This objective is not only an important aspect of the Xtreme Filmmaker's Challenge, but also of FMS as a whole. "That's the idea of the XFC: access," Quinn said.
In turn, the main function of the FMS is to be an organization in which people can come and share their ideas about film, Quinn added. Regular FMS meetings give members a chance to learn new filmmaking techniques, pitch ideas for films and help each other work with their own film projects. Such accessibility can be important in the context of a school that does not have an official film program.
For the films produced during the XFC, the FMS hosted a film screening of the completed projects Tuesday evening, which was attended by everyone from participants to staff members of the Clemons Digital Media Lab to local filmmaker Eric Hurt, Quinn added. The final projects implemented different themes and interpretations of the required elements, leading to pretty diverse results, Quinn noted. The films included such titles as "So Many Bananas," "Bad Apples," and "Bananaphone."
"Films usually end up being anywhere from one to eight minutes [long], depending on the degree of editing needed and how much footage was shot. But, as any filmmaker will tell you, having a one- or two-minute film with no prep time and only two hours to shoot is very impressive," Chipman said.
Truly an event for which no experience is necessary, the Xtreme Filmmaker's Challenge gave students of all levels of filmmaking experience a chance to be a director for a day, which can be one of the most dynamic roles to play, Li added. "It was really fun to work with them - and neat to see first-years and fourth-years who wanted to try it," she said.
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