 |
| Flickerfest International Short Film Festival director Bronwyn Kidd (l) with DP John Seale at the festival’s 2003 cinematography workshop, “Behind the Frame.” |
From Arizona to Australia, “film school” is taking on a whole new meaning. Aspiring moviemakers who want hands-on experience, along with young professionals brushing up on their technique, are training together in an unexpected venue—the worldwide film festival circuit. An emerging trend over the last several years has found festivals offering both academic and hands-on workshops to attendees in a bid to educate promising young talent, attract industry and tech company sponsorship and, of course, to lure a larger audience.
Where you have a festival, you have moviemakers—the people who are using these tools—gathered en masse,” says J.C. Bouvier, managing director of the Woods Hole Film Festival in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. “So we have the unique ability to have academics and product manufacturers offering information about their respective courses and wares.
“We began holding workshops seven years ago in order to give our audiences a total experience of film,” adds Bronwyn Kidd, festival director for the Flickerfest International Short Film Festival. “As most of our audiences are emerging filmmakers, or those involved in the creative process, it enables them to engage with how other people tell stories, demystifying the final experience of what ends up on the screen.”
Demand for deeper understanding about what goes on behind the scenes has encouraged a plethora of seminars to sprout up at festivals everywhere. They have numerous manifestations, from the DP and documentary workshops at the Ohio Independent Film Festival to the acting “boot camp” of the American Black Film Festival.
“I teach, so it's not a big stretch for me to get involved in educational programming,” explains George T. Marshall, founder and executive director of the Rhode Island International Film Festival (RIIFF), who is also an adjunct professor teaching communications at Rhode Island College. “For me, bridging education into what we do is a critical point.” His festival's parent organization, the 22-year-old Flickers Arts Collaborative, has run the festival throughout its seven year history. “Even when Flickers was running films [for the community], our surplus always went to a scholarship program that would help young people who were studying [film] in college.”
Students can find such opportunities for exposure and education to be attractive. In most instances at RIIFF, student films are mixed in with professional entries. Students are also lured by the chance to play with new equipment and to attend seminars with industry veterans. RIIFF has also dovetailed its screenplay competition into its master class. The competition winner gets the chance to have segments of their script produced during the following year's workshop. “So the screenwriter walks off not only with an award, but with a demonstration tape that they can use to pitch their script,” says Marshall.
The International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR), held each year in January, offers a one-day seminar that visits 13 cities in the Netherlands between October and January. Coordinated with 27 colleges and universities, the traveling Rotterdam Film Course allows students to “watch other films than they usually see,” says Juliette Jansen of IFFR. “The films we show at the festival are adventurous, art cinema. [This course will] prepare them as an audience for the festival, and make them enthusiastic film lovers.” She explains that this one-day festival primer is for academy and university students, “based on a theme from film history, theory or tradition.” It features full films, clips and discussions.
For the first time this year, the San Francisco Black Film Festival (SFBFF) offered a four-hour digital video motion picture workshop done in collaboration with the Cogswell Polytechnic College, which was facilitated by a local producer and Sundance winner. SBFF founder Ave Montague says that while they have held screening workshops in the past, it's been academic in nature rather than production-oriented.
“This year we zeroed in with a screenplay workshop and a one on digital motion pictures,” explains Montague. The participants of the production workshop were afforded the opportunity to “work from a pre-existing script, run a camera, prepare lights, build the set, shoot, act and complete a single five-minute scene.”
An important outgrowth of the current digital video revolution is the ascension of young moviemakers in their teens and pre-teens. SFBFF offers a sidebar event called the Urban Kidz Film Festival, which runs during the main program. The one-day event is now in its second year. “Last year we had this woman put together a wonderful workshop for kids,” said Montague. “She had the kids actually doing a scene from a script that she had, and they taped it. It was great.” Urban Kidz attendees range in ages from five to 12, and some of their films were even shown at this year's festival.
 |
| Troma Entertainment’s Lloyd Kaufman gets behind the camera at a Rhode Island International Film Festival master class. |
RIIFF inaugurated their KidsEye summer camp five years ago, after they began receiving many striking entries from children with access to digital technology. “We started getting some stuff in from kids that were 15 or 16 years old, and I was very impressed by it,” recalls Marshall. The first year, they tested a two-day course that offered basic production techniques which turned out to be a big success.
KidsEye has since evolved into a week-long program
that Marshall says is geared toward a younger level. “It's not designed to be stress-inducing,
it's just fun,” he says.
The children work with a screenplay from a shoot through to the edit. “It's
a nice intro program, and a lot of the kids come in with a good range of experience.
We run the gamut now from ages nine to 15.”
Projects produced by the children are screened at the KidsEye International Film Festival, which is held the same week as RIIFF. KidsEye also offers a scholarship program, and coming soon will be year-round weekend classes focused on different aspects of moviemaking, including acting, screenwriting, directing and editing.
Potentially widespread exposure and networking are other lures for festival-goers, whether they are children, students or professionals. After its main event, Flickerfest tours their main program to 13 venues around Australia. “On this tour, we screen four of our international short film programs in competition, along with some of our special programs,” remarks Kidd. “Flickerfest screened a total of 37 programs, comprising 3,700 minutes of short film, throughout main cities and regional areas of Australia. Our touring doubles the festival audience nationally.”
 |
| Participants in the Rhode Island International Film Festival’s
master class production workshop set up a scene. |
Both Flickerfest and the short film competition of RIIFF have met Academy Award qualification, meaning that any short film winners at either event are contenders for a future Academy Award nomination. Such an honor helps promote a festival, as do films that ascend from the indie circuit to national distribution, home video release or cable television. As a result of Academy recognition, Kidd says the Sydney-based Flickerfest expects its submissions to increase by 30 percent for the 2004 festival.
Industry support, academic tie-ins and manufacturer sponsorship play important roles in the evolution of these festivals as well. At Flickerfest, two of the three seminars this past January featured corporate involvement. Kodak sponsored the “Behind the Frame” seminar, which features one well-known cinematographer—this year it was Academy Award-winning DP John Seale (The English Patient)—and one first-time feature cinematographer, who discuss the influences behind their visual styles. The popular Digital Video Workshop, a day-long, hands-on guide to Avid Express and DV low-budget moviemaking, was run by award-winning documentary maker Philip Crawford (Hurt), along with representatives from Avid and Canon.
Bouvier believes the Woods Hole production and post-production workshops are the focus of increased attention because they're so sponsorship-friendly. They are now attracting interest from technology companies, camera manufacturers and hard drive manufacturers. “When filmmakers begin to see the technology companies offering sponsorships to a film festival,” he remarks, “they start to think that perhaps this is a place that they can connect with people who are going to help them actually get movies made. This year we've got Apple coming out in a large way... Apple just released the fourth version of Final Cut Pro, and they're going to be offering Final Cut Pro certified training through our workshop series. We also have DVD Studio Pro coming online, too.”
 |
| A Woods Hole Film Festival attendee takes advantage of the festival’s workshop program—and Apple’s sponsorship. |
With such cutting-edge workshops available, it seems that some festivals really want to make their programs as intensive as possible. They're not just about watching movies and hobnobbing anymore. “I just think that festival-goers are much more sophisticated,” states Montague, “so you not only draw from the normal people that attend films, you also draw from people who are in school. They think they can make a film because it's so easy right now. That's one of the reasons we're doing it.”
The digital revolution has certainly eased both technological accessibility and production capabilities, bringing moviemaking within the reach of increasingly younger artists. “We're in a transitionary period where people are getting used to the fact that the medium is liberating the ability of people to tell their tales,” says Bouvier. While he believes widespread DV availability is currently producing more quantity than quality, “I think that's going to change. We're going to have many more people who are gaining experience and learning from their mistakes. I think you'll probably see better content being produced because more people have access to the means of production.” MM