Just as its name suggests, the UCLA Shorttakes Festival is all
about maximizing time. With some entries as short as 90 seconds,
student filmmakers must utilize every second to successfully
portray their points.
“One of people’s complaints about shorts is that it
seems like they’re trying to pack a two-hour movie into six
minutes,” said Barry Friedman, a filmmaker in the narrative
category. “The key is to keep it simple and focus on one
event or one character study.”
While it may seem that short films require less effort because
of their length, in both narrative and animation categories, an
enormous amount of effort goes into the importance of
precision.
“You could see a short film as an advantage because you
don’t need to focus too much on narrative and can use stock
characters,” said Tony Vallone, a first-time participant in
the festival.
Despite the time constraint, the concept of a short allows for a
broad subject span, as reflected in the range of entries.
Vallone’s film focuses on a girl in a laundromat who gets
caught up in a song, while Friedman’s film is about college
romances and teddy bears.
“It’s sort of like a crazy surrealist comedy about a
world where teddy bears are alive and take sides in this love
triangle of college students,” Friedman said.
Filmmakers use short films not only for entertainment, but also
for education, as in the animated “Bid ‘Em In,”
which focuses on the cruelty of slave auctions. The film was
created through hand-drawn animation combined with computer
coloring in Photoshop.
“The film was created as an educational piece that
synthesizes art and social action. It’s intended to provide a
unique method of engagement to address race, gender, history and
issues of humanity,” said Ayappa Biddanda, co-producer of the
film.
Just as broad as the subject matter of the shorts are the ways
in which students get involved in the festival.
“I became part of the “˜Bid ‘Em In’ short
because I was immediately struck by Neal Sopata’s idea of
bridging culturally diverse communities, with music serving as an
integral backdrop of that landscape,” Biddanda said.
For Friedman, his submission to the festival came out of a class
assignment, which was integral in shaping the film’s
structure.
“Our task was to do a six-minute black-and-white short
film without any sync dialogue, so the point was to get across as
much as you can visually,” Friedman said.
The process that resulted in Vallone’s film was very
different, as “Spin Cycle” was shot all in one
night.
“Some friends and I were shooting a commercial and at the
end of the day we had extra film, and since film is really
expensive, we decided to make a short film,” Vallone said.
“Basically the whole thing took place from 7 p.m. to
midnight, and we just thought of something to make and did
it.”
Still, even with all the differences in subject matter and the
filmmaking process, each filmmaker has the same goal that more than
reflects the theme of the 12-year-old festival: Make the most of
the time you have.