Students worked to create their productions for the 4th Annual 7 Day Film Festival — a competition lead by Keene State Media Productions where participants are given exactly seven days to write, shoot and edit a film.
When signing up, participants are given a genre, a prop and line of dialogue to include in their films, as well as further instructions on the assignment.
Students of different majors join, and when screened, their films can earn one of two prizes: “Editors’ Choice” and “People’s Choice.”
“This year’s genre is reality TV, which has been a breath of fresh air with the variety of directions that we can take it,” said Erik Armbricht, a junior and executive board member of Keene State Media Productions. “We are actually taking aspects from various reality TV shows and compiling them all together,” Armbricht said.
Contributed Art / Aaron Testa: The 4th Annual Seven-Day Film Festival screening took place Wednesday, April 16 at 9:30 p.m. at the Putnam Theatre in Keene, New Hampshire.
“The genre we got is ‘Disaster Chick Flick,’ so we decided to make the disaster something everybody can relate to — the Wi-Fi being out,“ Melissa Jellie, a senior film production major who filmed and edited the production, said.
“We have a girl named Jessikka, who is trying to run for prom queen and the Wi-Fi goes out, so she has a very difficult time figuring out how she can win prom queen with this disaster,” Jellie said.
“We got the category of ‘mockumentary’ for the competition,” Nichole Albee, a sophomore film production major, said.
“The film we made is basically a parody of The Real Housewives. It’s called, The Reel Film Majors of Keene State, and it’s literally about four female film majors here at KSC,” Albee explained.
Albee said she helped write the story, acted in it and edited the film. The stories were conceived and brought to life within the seven-day turnaround.
With the different numbers of people involved in each project, finding times everyone was available to shoot proved to make the productions difficult to some students.
“People’s schedules created challenges for sure, as well as the workload as the semester comes to a close,” Armbricht said.
“Trying to capture everything we want within such a short shooting-window makes things difficult at times, often times having us rearrange our idea into a much more doable shoot,” Armbricht said.
Albee also expressed the group’s difficulty with conflicting schedules. “We had to shoot everything in a day because we simply didn’t have enough time to do it at another point in the week,” Albee said.
Participants noted the challenge brought together students of various disciplines.
“As the only film major in the group, there are some things that I know about stories and filming that others may not necessarily know, so I have to try and communicate those things while still accepting everybody’s ideas to make it a collaborative effort,” said Jellie.
“We have a group of people who are very unique, and combining everybody together is hilarious,” Jellie continued.
“Working with the cast is great. I’ve had two of the same teammates since my freshman year and the other teammate I had last year, so we all know how each other works and this allows us to be as productive as we can,” Armbricht said.
Armbricht continued, “Casts consist of five to six people, but in prior years we’ve reached up to a dozen different people helping us out.” Albee said her group’s crew played the cast as well, which made the production’s scheduling much easier to manage. “I hope the audience will get a slightly better picture of what film majors’ lives are actually like,” Albee said. The films were screened on April 16, 2014.
“I really hope to see more and more students — not just film students — partaking in such a fun festival in the upcoming years,” Armbricht said. “It is really a good learning experience to be on such a deadline.”
Anthony Munoz can be contacted at amunoz@keene-equinox.com