Lawrence High’s video students participated in the annual 24 Hour Film Festival this past November. In the statewide competition, students are given a mere 24 hours to direct, film, edit and produce a short film that will be judged early this week. Junior Ameelynn Sebastiani participated in the film festival for the first time this year.
“You are given a prompt with a bunch of requirements,” Sebastiani said. “There’s a required shot, there’s a required line, there’s required props and a time limit.”
This year the theme of the video was ‘the worst thing to happen is getting exactly what you want’. They were also required to use a water bottle, leaves on the ground, and a mirror as props.
The film students were split up into groups to create their videos. Each group had a crew of 6 people, and unlimited actors. Another member of Sebastiani’s group was senior Michael Clark.
All of the group member’s received the requirements on Friday at 3pm. Their group immediately got to work, and began planning immediately after school. Sebastiani believes that they didn’t utilize this time well enough.
“We went in a pretty messy way about it because we wasted 2 hours on an overcomplicated way of doing it,” Sebastiani said.
This group decided to get their sleep on Friday and work all day Saturday. They started filming at 9am and worked all the way to the deadline.
“We kinda were just scrambling for about 5 hours to try to get everything filmed and ready for editing,” Clark said. “We even were getting scenes 30 minutes before we needed to finish editing.”
Video teacher Zach Saltz notices that different groups have various tactics for planning the videos.
“Some groups like to spend that whole afternoon just planning out the story,” Saltz said. “Some groups like to film right away, but if you don’t have a story in mind, it can be really chaotic on set.”
This year there were various challenges for the filmers. Some groups had students who had to leave early, other students had district choir auditions the next morning. For Clark’s group, there were creative differences.
“That’s mostly the reason why we didn’t get as much filmed as we wanted to,” Clark said. “Because for the first 3 hours, we were going back and forth on different ideas for the film.”
Saltz takes a step back approach for this competition. He believes this should be created solely by the students and refrains from giving input. He also believes this festival is a great bonding and learning experience for students.
“Being in a classroom, listening to teachers lecture, that’s a one very rigid method of learning,” Saltz said. “But being on a film set, doing that hands on, when you have to solve problems on the spot, that’s the best way to do it.”
The students submit their videos to a panel of judges and then receive feedback and placements. LHS has never received first and Saltz hopes this is the year.
“However, it is not about winning. The real benefit of it is just being able to finish a film that you’re proud of and have fun with your friends and do something different,” Saltz said.
No matter what, Clark and Sebastiani are proud of how their video came together.
“It was really fun actually,” Sebastiani said. “I liked running around the school at night when no one was there…It was just overall a great experience.”
