Campus MovieFest take "Five"

In anticipation of the fifth anniversary of Campus MovieFest (CMF), the 'Nique sat down with two movie-making teams to get a glimpse of Tech students at their creative best.

The first team we interviewed, Spinnaker Productions, is a relatively veteran team now in their fourth year of movie making.

While officially the teams are required to have seven team members, this team is really made up of four core members: Ed Phelps, Konrad Rykaczewski, Matt Widlansky and Jason Ho.

According to Rykaczewski, it's better to have a small team because work can be done more effectively. Of course the size of the crew needed depends heavily on the type of film being made.

In the CMF, each team of students is given a handheld camcorder, a laptop and free rein to mold their creative juices into a five-minute movie about anything.

There is a theme each year for the movies, but while some movies are closely tied to the theme, for most, the connection to the theme is often a stretch. Last year's theme was "Good goes around." One of the movies submitted featured a main character named "Good" who...went around. "Each year the theme gets dumber and dumber," Rykaczewski said. The theme for CMF's fifth anniversary is "Five."

New to this year's festival, CMF now offers three prize categories that students can compete in: documentary, drama and comedy.

To take advantage of the new prize categories, Spinnaker Productions is producing a documentary on the use, or lack therefore of public transportation in Atlanta titled "Just Say No to Public Transit." The idea for the documentary came from a picture of Five Points Rykaczewski saw in the book Atlanta Then and Now that showed a bustling street scene filled with pedestrians and cables cars.

"[The problem of public transportation] has bothered me since coming to Tech," he said. The film focuses on Atlantans' reliance on personal cars and their attitudes towards the public transportation system in place now.

"It's a really cool thing this year," Rykaczewski said, referring to the prize categories. Movies submitted to the documentary category have the added chance of being featured on the History Channel.

The movie-making process is one full of unexpected suprises, both good and bad.

Last year Rykaczewski's team's laptop crashed three hours before the turn-in deadline, and this year equipment problems delayed the team for two days.

For future teams looking to make a movie, Rykaczewski has the following advice: get started early. His lesson learned from previous years of movie-making is that you always have to plan for the "what if" situations.

Sarah Kuhns, a freshman mathematics major, formed a group with six of her friends.

"I knew that it would be a lot of fun to make a movie with my friends. I think that Campus Movie Fest is a great idea because there are a lot of students with interesting ideas that wouldn't have the means to make a movie otherwise," Kuhns said.

As a first-year CMF participant, Kuhns said that experience is definitely not a requirement to participate.

The camera and software is easy to use and no prior film editing work is necessary to successfully make a movie.

However, a little knowledge of film techniques is always helpful, as Kuhns found out.

"I have had prior experience with iMovie as well as making movies. During my senior year in high school, a few of my friends and I made a movie for a school-wide contest."

Film manipulation was done with the use of a Mac laptop and Apple's iMovie program. The program is fairly popular among amateur digital movie makers.

"I like that iMovie is easily accessible to the public. iMovie is easy to use with no prior experience with editing software. Also, it is not nearly as pricey as most other editing software," Kuhns said.

According to Kuhns, the most time-consuming part of the process is editing, which "usually takes awhile because rendering the film once you finally decide how you want everything to look is a lengthy process. I would say that editing this time was more of a hassle because there was something screwy with our computer and it liked to freeze."

As with Spinnaker Productions, Kuhns' team had unexpected problems during production.

"One of the big problems with filming was the weather; the rain and wind did not help much. Another problem came up when the computer decided to freeze and corrupt the clips," she said.

"The only thing I might change would be the time of year the competition is held or the length of time given to complete the movie."