Keene State’s Media Productions group held a Romantic-Comedy Film Festival on Thursday, Feb. 15, at 7 p.m. in the Drennan Auditorium. The festival showcased two student-made films, “Interruptions,” directed by first-years Heather Gibb, Hadden Morrill and Cameron Rockwell and “Sounds of Valentine’s Day,” directed by junior Jacob Conway. Conway is also the vice president of Media Productions, alongside junior Colin Murphy as president.
“With Colin and I being in these leadership positions, this is the first time that the Rom-Com Festival is happening,” said Conway. “We’re not entirely 100 percent sure if something similar has happened in the history of Keene State Media Productions.”
“The reason why we did Rom-Com is because it’s February, [we’re] trying to keep a theme to the month,” Conway said. Rockwell said “Interruptions” took seven hours to film.
“When Colin and Jacob first brought up the Rom-Com Film Festival, we [Rockwell, Morrill and Gibb] decided to form a group,” he said. The three chose to adapt a scene from the play, “You Can’t Take It With You” for their movie.
“We basically rewrote it but kept in a lot of the same dialogue,” said Rockwell. “Overall, there’s like five interruptions but we decided to only do three.”
Morrill, another director for the movie, said he wanted to adapt a scene from “You Can’t Take It With You” after hearing about the show during his senior year of high school.
“We put a total of five hours that weren’t shooting,” Morrill said. “It’s a lot more difficult than it seems.”
Morrill also attended the festival and said he enjoyed it. “It was good. It was well done,” he said. “Both of the films were very good. Both of them accomplished what they were attempting to accomplish.”
For their next event, Media Productions plans to host a Music Video Festival on March 7 in the Drennan Auditorium. Any student is invited to make and submit a video to the festival. Media Productions is also planning an end-of-the-year competitive festival.
“We’re still coming up with a theme for that,” said Conway. “There’s going to be submissions, there’s going to be judges that we’re trying to get from different departments, and we are going to have prizes. We’re trying to keep active with these events.”
Conway said that the events and festivals Media Productions hosts are meant to share student work with the rest of the school. “One half of the club is to give people the opportunity and the resources to be able to make the films that they want to, specifically outside of classes,” Conway said. “The other half, we wanted to be able to show those works.”
Murphy emphasized the variety of works students can produce for the organization.
“When we’re Keene State Media Productions, we’re trying to be an outlet for people to produce media. And that can be anything that’s a digital medium,” Murphy said.
Conway described the state of the club in the spring 2024 semester. “This club has been around for at least a decade,” said Conway. “Unfortunately, with the pandemic, the membership and the activity kind of died.”
“Colin and I are really trying to revive this club back to what it used to be,” he added.
Emily Sloane can be contacted at
esloane@kscequinox.com
