Eyelight 2017

Swept! The! Festival! 3 films, 6 awards, Outstanding Personal Achievement Award, $100 check! It was a good night.

The Archer

The eyeFix Commercial

Ice: A Suicide Prevention PSA

Before: So it started out rough, I heard about the festival about a week before submissions were due. I was very behind on editing. That made me rush the Archer at first. Then like the day before the submissions deadline, I get an email saying that it has been extended. I was very thankful, because that gave me a good amount of time to edit. I was really excited to submit, because the festival was so much fun the year before. It was fancy enough, but still not stressful, I really liked that. So my goal this year was to beat my two awards last year. And I wanted to submit all 3 of the films I worked on throughout the year, The Archer, the eyeFix Commercial, and Ice. A few weeks before the festival I get an email from ms. Larsen (old film teacher) and she said that the festival was now on a Thursday night at the community college gym in Vacaville, 20 mins from davis. Apparently the theater from last year was not available. I wasn’t sure how they’d pull it off, but it was about seeing the films, not the location.

The festival: I went with Evan, my family, and my brother. The location wasn’t bad. It wasn’t a gymnasium, it was more like an event room. Granted they only had roller chairs to sit it, it wasn’t all too bad. My films went by well, people laughed at the eyefix. Other people’s films weren’t up to my expectation. Vacaville valley Christian always submits films, last year they weren’t half bad, but this year they were just bad. Some worse than others, but still. Then the last few were by college students and were really good. So it was an interesting mix of films.

Awards: Anyway, all my films came up and each one like 2 awards each. I actually forget which one for which, but I got a nice spread of minor awards. They were video editing, best commercial, best sound, best producer,

Eyelight Film Festival 2016

Poster for Instantly Involved; was posted on the wall of the theatre

TWO AWARDS– Best Suspense Film and Trailer. Not bad… not bad at all…

I made Instantly Involved as a short from the full feature movie I’m working on (read about in Projects posts). I was coerced by my film teacher to enter it, because I was originally reluctant. The movie’s short open plot is a result of this clip deriving from a much longer film. That’s why I didn’t want to enter it originally. I’m glad that I did though, obviously. This one scene in particular I did spend more time on. It wasn’t all easy though. we filmed the walking scene with Lev and Ryan twice, because it got dark and broke the continuity. So actually them walking and them finding the body was filmed a month from each other; luckily it is very hard to tell. Makeup was a challenge too. As a 16 year old guy, I’ve had very little experience with any makeup. Luckily it was blood makeup. I bought the blood and but it on a torn up paper towel to create the gunshot effect. This turned out surprisingly well and actually scared some concerned pedestrians that passed by the filming location. Another interesting fact is that I didn’t think about doing parallel editing until Lev mentioned it right before filming. I thought it was a great idea, therefore I credited him as cinematographer. This one clip really stands alone and made it well as a short.

I made the trailer in about an hour before it was due. At first I didn’t have any good ideas, so I didn’t spend much time on it. Once I started making it, I realized it actually flowed a lot better than I thought. I still did not expect it to win anything though. I was definitely surprised

I also want to mention that I did participate in another video as well; Don’t Let Go. It won best picture! I was credited as Editor, Musical Editor and Pianist. The video is a parody music video of Let It Go with the theme of League of legends. There was a lot of effort put into it. Its not perfect, but was still a great achievement. There were about 10 students working on the film and it took weeks to edit; about 3 hours a day, not including the animation at the beginning. The musical accompaniment was great too. I had to learn the whole base line of Let It Go on piano in like 3 days. And the piano, vocals, violin, flute and cello were all mixed together separately. It took a long time and the effort really made it deserve the award. (I don’t have a link for it)

More about the festival in my next PU.