Tech team wins CMF National Grand Finale

Every spring, hundreds of Tech students compete in Campus MovieFest (CMF), an annual contest that gives inspiring filmmakers one week to shoot and edit a five-minute short film. For most students the experience only lasts that week and quickly ends after the curtain drops on Tech's CMF Finale. However, for one lucky team, 1.618 Films, this year the clapboard did not drop on their journey until after they were awarded Best Picture at the CMF National Grand Finale in late April.

The team's film, Fanya Kaplan, tells the story of the woman who failed at assassinating Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin in 1918. Bradley Herrmann, a fourth-year Mechanical Engineering major, and Michael Gluzman, a third-year Industrial Design major, directed the film. The title character is played by Becky Tucker, a fourth-year Physics major who also happens to be engaged to Herrmann.

Even though all filming and editing happened during CMF's allotted six days, the planning process started before Christmas break when the team began writing the script and gathering supplies. "[Gluzman] and writer Wesley Wingo actually came up with the [idea of using the life of Fanya Kaplan] while looking for stories of famous assassins on Wikipedia. As there never [have] been any movies or books written on the events, we both had to dig deep to find out the real facts and use knowledge of the time period to fill in what probably would have happened. We wanted to both be as historically accurate as we could, while still giving the audience a story they could enjoy and relate to in five minutes," Herrmann said.

Gluzman was born in Russia and still speaks Russian with his family, so he had personal ties to a Russian story.

The team researched and found all the information available on Kaplan, Lenin and the Bolsheviks, even translating several sources. A key dramatic speech in the film uses the exact words that Kaplan uttered shortly before her execution.

The historically-driven, well-crafted story was just one of the things that made Fanya Kaplan stand out from the other films.

"The panel of judges focus primarily on the story and overall quality of the film, followed by aesthetics, technical excellence and sound design. While the results were very close between the exceptional short movies from across the country, Fanya Kaplan excelled in all of the judging elements," said David Roemer, CMF's co-founder and CEO.

As if putting together a movie on such a tight schedule was not hard enough, the film was done completely in Russian to better convey the story. English subtitles were added in post-preduction.

Gluzman, who also acted in the movie, was the only cast member who already spoke Russian. He taught his co-stars (Tucker and Matthew Perry, a third-year management major) Russian phonetically and gave them recordings of his reading of the lines so they would know the proper pronunciation.

Although it is clear that the directors heavily contributed to the film, Herrmann credits the success of the final product to the whole team's effort. "There were so many dedicated and experienced people who worked on this film, it couldn't have been done without them. This is for them," he said.

According to Herrmann, winning so many awards was never their main goal, but instead they wanted to present a solid story that could stand on its own, free of gimmicks. "We simply wanted to make a good movie, that we...would be proud of, and that winning anything would be nice, but certainly that was not our original goal at all," he said.

But the team did win, and at every stage of the competition the group was rewarded for their efforts. "[1.618 Films team members] won CMF engraved video iPods and new Apple computers for their efforts. The film was showcased at the Tech CMF Finale, the Atlanta CMF Grand Finale and the CMF National Grand Finale in partnership with the Atlanta Film Festival. Plus, CMF coordinated a screening of Fanya Kaplan at the Georgia Big Picture Conference in April," Roemer said.

1.618 Films will face even more competition next year as CMF is expanding to even more schools, including campuses in the cinematic hotbeds of New York and Los Angeles, but CMF still expects strong entries from Tech. "We can't wait to see what Tech comes up with next year. The competition will be heating up as the students will be competing against even more cities," said Megan Solomon, public relations coordinator for CMF.

Whether or not Herrmann goes on to succeed in next year's competition, he said his CMF experience over the last three years has taught him a great deal about making short films. "Filmmaking in its essence is visual story telling, and to get across your idea to an audience in such a short period of time requires a great deal of forethought and effort. A solid story and real characters are the core of your film. On a separate level a short film is often hinged on it's editing. Cutting directly to important parts of the story and making the pacing flow are crucial in such a short time period," he said.