If you’re interested in movies but need to find your fan base, the Parkway Digital Film Festival is for you. This annual event shows films that students of all grade levels have directed and starred in. They were presented at Logan College on April 26. The film festival is made to show the way students make connections from their school studies to video storytelling.
Five students from Parkway Central had their videos selected to premiere at the festival. Two from the Advanced Broadcasting class, juniors Jordan Nathanson and Ryan Fidell, and three from the Radio and TV class, sophomore Jennifer Rubin and juniors Ben Kraus and Zach Prelutsky.
Kraus and Prelutsky chose to do a PSA on bonfire safety because it was an original idea that no one had done a project on that topic before. Rubin says the idea for her PSA ‘Get Active’ was very easy to come up with; she wanted to inspire people.
“I like being active, [it’s] an important life lesson and it’s a lot different hearing it from a student rather than a teacher,” Rubin said. “I really like those Nike commercials with the quick shots [of athletes], so that’s what I decided to model mine after.”
Nathanson agreed that topic selection was easy, saying that he thought his topic of distracted driving was strong because of how many people this problem affects. Nathanson also said that he hoped to make a difference in the way people drive by making this PSA.
Both Rubin and Nathanson said that coming up with the idea and script was fairly quick, taking about two days. The filming process for each was very different, though. Rubin said that she attended the same gym class for a few weeks to film everything they did. She also stayed after school at various sports practices and pulled some people out of gym class and practices so she could get more close-up shots of them. Nathanson, on the other hand, said his filming process combined with his editing process together only took about two weeks.
Rubin says her editing process took a few weeks, as well. She had to cut down most of the clips to about two seconds each and put them back to back. While Rubin did the editing and filming processes by herself, she said it was easier to accomplish because of her background of photography through her mother.
Kraus said his video took a rather short amount of time to do, but behind the camera was difficult. While they spent only a small amount of time filming and editing, they had to do many, many takes in order for the video to come out just so.
While the behind the scenes work of these videos may have taken a while, the students got their rewards at Logan College. They were able to watch theirs and others videos, talk with other students who were there, and walk down a red carpet that was reserved for these directors.