The Filmmakers’ Ambitions Club is hosting its first annual 5-minute film competition, open to all UC Davis students.
All entries are due this Sunday. An entry must be an original interpretation of “Cinderella,” “Humpty-Dumpty” or “The Three Little Pigs” and cannot exceed five minutes.
“Hopefully the competition will get students excited about amateur filmmaking,” said Phillip Chu, Filmmakers’ Ambitions treasurer. “The existing film festival is much more formal and we thought that might be a barrier to more novice or inexperienced filmmakers. It’s a lot of fun to just get out there and shoot something with your friends, and since just about everyone these days has a video camera on their phone, we wanted to have a fun theme that would encourage anyone to submit something.”
Submitted entries will be judged by a panel of professors from the Cinema and Technocultural Studies Program (CaTS).
Filmmakers’ Ambitions is a student-run filmmaking and networking club that aims to connect students who want to learn more about filmmaking and who want to work on film projects. According to Chu, the club is committed to a more active approach to filmmaking than in years past, hence the creation of the competition.
The first-place prize is $250, followed by $50 for second place and a DV700 handheld digital video camcorder for third place. Some of the prize money is from CaTS while the rest is from savings that the club has acquired through fundraisers and other means.
The ASUCD Entertainment Council is co-sponsoring the competition.
“We’re starting to reach out to student groups that are looking to put on events,” said Tim Chin, assistant director of the Entertainment Council.
David Ou, promotions assistant for the Entertainment Council, agreed.
“We’re promoting it to a demographic that wouldn’t normally hear about these events,” Ou said. “The competition is a fantastic way to bring out the filmmaker in everyone. We’ve all read the classic children’s stories, and we interpret them in different ways, so it will be interesting to see what the filmmakers come up with.”
STEPHANIE B. NGUYEN can be reached at campus@theaggie.org.
