Courtesy of Elizabeth Zanghi/ The Ram Campus Movie fest causes people to rush for the video camera every year in hopes of winning the grand prize.
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Growing up, many Fordham students had dreams of one day going to Hollywood to enter the filmmaking business. Some have gotten the opportunity to make movies during their time on campus.
Fordham University recently participated in Campus MovieFest, a national competition that allows college students to produce five-minute long films.
“Basically, for a week, students are allowed to use professional filming equipment that the Campus MovieFest provides,” said Marisa Schmidt, FCRH ’15, who directed a movie with two other students for the event. “For a week, they come up with a movie, and they have to film the entire thing, to have everything drawn up and included.”
Schmidt also talked to The Fordham Ram about her own entry into the competition.
“My movie was a documentary about the Battle of the Bands that occurred at Fordham,” Schmidt stated. “Our movie had montages at the beginning where we acted as if we were bored and we had these montages of us doing silly things because we were bored. And then it went into these montages of Battle of the Bands, what’s happening on Friday. And then we had montages of the different bands, Keating Steps, Bright Red Cardinal and La La Lush, in our video. We interviewed them, we interviewed people at the event, and we interviewed people before the event.”
Participants said that they enjoyed the movie experience
“It was actually a lot of fun,” Matt Windels, FCRH ’13, who plays a fictional resident assistant gone rogue in a film directed by Alex Avalos, FCRH ’13, said of the acting process. “I like to think I did pretty well.”
The competition also introduced the students to some of the challenges faced by filmmakers.
“We lost a lot of our sound for the footage, because the microphones died,” Schmidt said. “We basically took the ones we did have sound for and used them in our video, and then the ones that we didn’t have sound for but really liked, we put sound over. We used Bright Red Cardinal’s original song in our movie to kind of cover that up.”
Windels told The Fordham Ram that his team encountered some challenges with regards to the length of their film as well.
“No movie always ends up exactly like you want it to,” Windels said. “We had to cut it a lot to make the five-minute maximum.”
Schmidt also explained what the next steps are for the entries into Campus MovieFest.
“I know that this week, April 26, they’re going to be showing the top 16 videos from this campus, and the Best Picture and the Best Drama and the Best Comedy from this campus,” Schmidt said. “And then after that, all the movies get uploaded onto YouTube. The winner of the Best Picture here gets to go to Nationals.”
Schmidt was referencing the Campus MovieFest in Hollywood, Calif. which consists of the top entries from college campuses all over the nation.
“My career would be in education; I just did this for fun,” Windels said. “It’s not even about winning the contest for me, it’s about filming a movie and having fun with it.”
