The average UCLA student is inundated by the signs and trappings of the movie industry. Our little movie theater-crammed village is regularly blocked off for premiers, and the campus buildings we walk by every day seem to appear in every other movie about college life.
Last week, though, students had the chance to take the movie-making process into their own hands.
More than 120 student teams registered for Campus MovieFest, to try to write, film and edit five-minute movies in one week.
The top 16 films, selected by CMF with the input of students and faculty, were screened Saturday night in Ackerman Grand Ballroom, the quality of the films ranging from YouTube-like indulgences to standard fare for college film festivals ““ well-shot movies with great cinematography, sometimes with a decent story to go along with it.
Keeping the one-week time limit in mind, though, some of the movies were truly remarkable, grounding creativity very locally in the UCLA experience. With the lack of time, many teams were restricted to using the campus as their backdrop.
Most of the films were well served by this restriction, as the audience of about 150 students appreciated jokes and references that might not have worked with any other group of viewers ““ at least three films made references to fliering on Bruin Walk. “Uncommon Sense” was particularly UCLA-focused, centered on an architecture student’s quest to understand the ridiculous fire escape doors in Rieber Hall’s dining hall that lead to nowhere.
Other films also grasped the essential qualities of shorts ““ unique concepts and interesting cinematography that do not try too hard to beat the viewer over the head with some sort of profound message.
Most of the 16 shorts were comedies, which were received slightly more enthusiastically than the serious films. “Balls Away,” which won Best Comedy, featured a jubilant red ball that escaped its juggler and bounced its way across campus, doing good and saving lives, from hitting a crosswalk button, to performing the Heimlich maneuver, to thwarting an attempted murder.
“Romania, CA,” which won Best Picture, was a well-acted film about a bat-bite victim who misinterprets a doctor’s joke that he will become a vampire as a serious diagnosis. Only after stealing a trench coat, constructing a cardboard coffin, breaking up with his girlfriend because he has “embraced the darkness” and trying to satisfy his blood lust by biting his roommate does the vampire-to-be return to the doctor to learn that he has been misled.
Although a few of the movies showed the strain of the time constraints, the only truly confusing script was whatever the two hosts of the evening thought they were working from. Their awkward performance and inability to clearly explain the contest or even throw T-shirts into the crowd made it hard to believe that they had already hosted similar CMF screenings at campuses on the path from Atlanta to Los Angeles.
During the second break between the films, after a particularly muddled and obnoxious delivery of stilted lines and weak attempts to hype the crowd, one of the hosts announced “Halfway done, guys” as he retreated off the stage.
It’s unclear whether the comment was supposed to make the audience feel like they were slogging through poorly made films ““ which would be unfair even to the few movies that were very clearly made by amateur filmmakers in one week, during midterm season, or if the hosts were referring to the roles in which they had been horribly miscast, as purportedly entertaining masters of ceremony.
In any case, the comment was out of place with the generally accepting, light-hearted mood of the audience, who were nonetheless able to sit through ““ and even enjoy ““ the remaining eight films that their peers had created.
““ Audrey Kuo
E-mail Kuo at akuo@media.ucla.edu.