The second annual Student Film Showcase will take place Saturday, April 20 in Walker Auditorium, and submissions for the showcase are being accepted until March 8.
The Student Film Showcase is an hour’s worth of multiple short films submitted by SNHU’s own student filmmakers. The amount of submissions chosen will ultimately be determined by how many can fit within the hour time slot.
Assistant Professor of Communications, David Humphreys, and his colleague, Professor Colin Root, will look for exceptional uniqueness, cinematography, sound, interviews and story within the short films.
The films can cover a broad range of genres such as fiction, avant-garde, documentaries and motion graphic projects. It is meant to be an event where students can show off their work to their friends, family and community in a more formal setting than in a classroom.
“They put a lot of hard work into what they’re doing, so having this opportunity for them to screen their work in a professional setting is really important to showing them that we as a community care about the work that they’re making,” said Humphreys.
The idea for the Student Film Showcase was cultivated by a conversation between Humphreys and Professor Vanessa Rocco, who helps run the Humanities Film Series alongside Root. Rocco approached Humphreys with the idea of showing off student creations as opposed to showing a famous film at the end of the year.
Humphreys wanted to do something similar, and he had even had students for one of his classes put on a smaller showcase of their own. So, when the opportunity to execute a formal showcase arose, he accepted it right away.
Last year’s showcase was a huge success with approximately 100 attendees and a vast diversity among projects, according to Humphreys. While Humphreys expressed the desire for more people to attend, he stressed that the true requirement for all attendees is open-mindedness and an appreciation for their peers’ work.
“I would like to see everybody from across the campus: faculty, administrative staff, the students supporting their friends, their peers, their family. If we get a good cross sampling of that with fifty people in the house, I’m going to be happy,” said Humphreys. “I just want the students to have support and community showing up and saying, ‘What you’re doing is important.’”
Humphreys is especially excited for some of the avant-garde films. He expressed major enthusiasm as he told a story about last year’s showcase. One of the students’ submissions consisted of music, a fishbowl and food coloring. The film showed many different colors of food coloring mixing together in the fishbowl until the water turned to black.
“It was just this really nice film. It made you think about the process of filmmaking itself and the colors mixing and it was just very meditative,” said Humphreys. “That’s not something you normally get in documentary and non-fiction work. It was also a challenge for him to do because he’s never worked in that medium before, so he pushed himself and ended up with what I think was a really successful film.”
This year, Humphreys hopes to see two films in particular that he has noticed students working on. One will experiment with the mixing of paint and another will focus on the use of light and LEDs.
Despite his excitement about the avant-garde films, Humphreys explained that the submissions for the showcase are open to anyone and everyone who has been working on a film of any genre. He encourages students to submit their work to have the experience of a public screening which is important to put on a resume.
Additionally, Humphreys explained that the showcase allows for an even greater opportunity for student filmmakers. He shared his own experiences with screening a film and explained how nerve-wracking it was, but he also stressed that the rewards of screening their own work far outweighed any anxieties that students have.
“I remember last time, someone had a comedy and afterward they came up and said, ‘People were laughing at it,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I know. Isn’t it awesome?’” said Humphreys. “At the end of the day, you’re not making work to sit in this bubble. You make work to share and put it out there and let the audience like it or not. This is kind of a first taste of that.”
Humphreys hopes to keep this tradition going and see students’ interest in the event grow as it evolves. He also hopes that many students will take the leap this year and submit their creations despite any nerves they may have at seeing them on the big screen. After all, as Humphreys said, “People either don’t like art, or they do like art, and it doesn’t reflect the artist.”
Any student who has been working on a film and would like to have it displayed during this event can contact Humphreys at d.humphreys@snhu.edu.
