Union Board shows student film festival

From photo montage to live action to computer animation, IU students submitted a variety of films to the Union Board's second annual Student Film Festival. The Union Board will be screening the films 8 p.m. today and Friday in the Whittenberger Auditorium at the Indiana Memorial Union. \n"We have a really great selection this year," said Eleni Peters, director of Celebrate the Arts, a Union Board committee. "All of the films were really well done, and I am very excited about them."\nThe Union Board received 11 entries to this year's film festival and different films will be screened each night. The audience will vote by ballot on their favorite film for a People's Choice Award for each evening. The winners will receive a $20 gift certificate to Cinemat, a T-shirt from American Cinematographer and a copy of the "American Cinematographer Manual," which contains information about film-making and is worth $100. \nThe manual was edited by Rachael Bosley, a 1999 alumna of IU's School of Journalism's graduate program and the chief editor of American Cinematographer magazine. She will speak about the nature of independent film at the film festival awards Saturday. She is also joining graduate students Robert Clift and Susan Kelly on the judging panel.\nThe films will also be evaluated by a panel of three judges for the Critics' Choice Award. At 8 p.m. Saturday, the panel will announce the winners, hand out prizes and screen the winning films.\nBosley said she is looking forward to seeing what kinds of films students have created. \n"Student film makers are finding their own voice as individuals," Bosley said. "It lends a little excitement to it."\nThe student film makers have put a lot of time and effort into their productions. "Prodigium," a computer-animated film created on campus through MIME, Masters in Immersive Mediated Environments, took nearly six months to create and will be shown Friday. \nDavid Sharp, who graduated in December, and seniors Thomas Murphy and Jeremy Zimmerman started the film as an independent study project last May and it was completed in December 2003. One of the scenes in the film took more than 600 hours to render. \n"The problem with doing 3-D animation is that everything takes so long," Murphy said. "We aren't just out there with a camera shooting scenes. Every little detail is something we had to create ourselves." In "Prodigium," which Murphy described as a comic fantasy, a knight goes after a wizard who lives in a tower. The wizard attempts to cast a spell to stop the knight, but the spell goes terribly wrong. MIME director Thom Gillespie oversaw the production. \n"These guys knew how to play well together," Gillespie said. "This is exponentially better than anything anyone in the program has ever done. It looks very professional. This will open every door they want to knock on."\nGraduate student Daniel Perretti bought the rights to a short story by Harlan Ellison which he adapted into a screenplay for his live action film, "The Cheese Stands Alone." His film, scheduled to screen Thursday, is about a dentist who leaves his wife only to find himself trapped in a bookstore forever.\n"It has a sort of 'Twilight Zone' feel to it," Perretti said. "I picked it because I liked the imagery in it."\nMost of the filmmakers came up with their own stories. "The Victory Brothers INC.," playing Thursday, is a compilation of three short comedic sketches created by a group of students who grew up making movies together in Noblesville, Ind.\n"We are really close so it's great to keep working together," said junior Tyler Beem who was involved in the production with juniors Drew Lazzara, Eli Duke, Andrew Brennan, Keith Starling and Ball State student Brandon Troy. "We've really upped the production quality since high school. Now we have boom mikes and everything."\nThe group used short stop animation in one of their skits involving a stuffed animal entitled "Hangover in a Half Shell." \nIn "Tower of Temperature," as two men climb a tower, one gets hotter and the other colder with each passing second.\nIn "The Color of Woo," a documentary which will play Friday, senior Scott Vanderpoel and junior Matthew Waters followed junior Andy Bon Woo, a quad-lingual Phillipino IU student, around with a video camera for one day to reveal Woo's quirks.\n"There's a lot of funniness to it," Waters said. "He ends up getting drunk and singing in Spanish and parts of 'Aladdin.' We didn't' want to show the typical partying, but something different. It's sort of a mock-umentary."\n-- Contact staff writer Jenica Schultz at jwschult@indiana.edu.