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The Indiana Daily Student

arts

Instant Gratification Movie Challenge to kick off seventh year

Eric Ayotte is a musicain and filmaker in Bloomington, Indiana. He is the founder of the Instant Gratification Film Movie Challenge, a monthly film contest. The contest has its first screening of the year this Sunday.

When Eric Ayotte had a short film accepted into the New York International Independent Film Festival in 2000, he said the lack of community and commercialization of the festival left him frustrated.

Ayotte, the founder of Bloomington’s Instant Gratification Movie Challenge, and his co-producer Charlie Jones will begin the seventh year of their monthly movie challenge Sunday. The screening recently found a home in Bloomington’s newly-opened art space, the Void.

The Instant Gratification Movie Challenge is a tool to build a stronger film community, Ayotte said.

“The audience is very forgiving,” he said. “It’s a very low-pressure thing. There’s no competition, there’s no cash prizes. People aren’t coming to judge.”

Each month, Ayotte and other filmmakers decide on a theme the films must loosely relate to. This month’s theme is “Cliffhanger.”

“It’s up to people to interpret it however they want,” he said. “Someone can come in with a movie where the main character’s named Cliff, or someone can be literally hanging from a cliff.”

When Ayotte was growing up in upstate New York, he said he found out anybody could be in a band, which led him to become immersed in the do-it-yourself punk scene.

As he and his friends were making short films for fun, he said the DIY mentality easily transferred over to 
filmmaking.

“You can just do it,” he said. “You don’t need to wait for money, you don’t need to wait for approval from a teacher, you don’t have to even have a script. You can just make a movie.”

As a result, Ayotte studied film and television production at State University of New York at New Paltz. After finetuning his filmmaking skills, he founded the Gadabout Film Festival, an alternative film festival that tours across the country.

Founding the festival was the result of his negative experience at the New York International Independent Film Festival, Ayotte said.

“That was what sparked us to starting the Gadabout, was how frustrated we were,” he said. “It’s an attitude that’s hard to put into words. But there’s something at those commercial film festivals that turns a film into a 
commodity, as opposed to a piece of art.”

Through connections he made in the music scene and from traveling with the Gadabout, he said he decided to move to Bloomington and begin “Cob Job,” a weekly program that aired on Cable Access Television.

One week, Ayotte said “Cob Job” ran a special where each of the show’s creators made a film to be aired. The special soon transformed into the Instant Gratification Movie Challenge.

“It was so much fun, and all the movies were so good that I was like, ‘We should keep this going as a monthly thing,’” he said.

The monthly movie challenge has been hosted at Rhino’s Youth Center and the Owlery for the past six years. Ayotte said they moved to the Void this year in order to give the screening a permanent home — one that goes hand-in-hand with the town’s DIY music scene.

All films submitted to the challenge will be screened, Ayotte said. In fact, he said they don’t watch the films prior to the screening.

“People show up with thumb drives with their finished movies,” he said. “People are editing the day of, people are filming the day of sometimes.”

Because of the constant push to make a new film each month, he said filmmakers are challenged to become more creative, take risks and make something that otherwise wouldn’t have been made.

As for now, Ayotte said he wants to expand the Instant Gratification Movie Challenge to become more accessible to IU students. In the future, he said he would like to see monthly movie challenges in multiple cities.

After making home movies with his teenage friends for years, Ayotte said he believes his DIY approach to filmmaking can be replicated by anyone, which is why the monthly movie challenge encourages practice for 
filmmakers.

“Through making tons and tons of short films, we were learning things, we were getting better,” he said. “People were seeing them, so we were getting this idea of how they were going over. I think you can’t get that from just learning in a classroom and making your one big film.”

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