Eric Anderson and Dr. Darl Larsen, Media Arts Department
Beginnings
After receiving the award from the Office of Research and Creative Activities, I set out to follow the exact design of my proposal in accomplishing something for my fellow Media Arts students and friends. I thought it would be a fairly easy task to try and systematically evaluate former winners of film festivals and in turn use that information to help BYU’s filmmakers design their films towards winning a film festival.
Soon enough I learned that this wasn’t something that can be systematically evaluated. After long talks with several Media Arts faculty members and professionals, and after talking at length with my faculty mentor – Darl Larsen, I found that the direction that I had initially proposed was not the direction I needed to go.
Research
In my proposal I wanted to create statistically useful criteria that were common among films accepted into the Student Academy Awards and other film festivals. After speaking with several “insiders” in the film festivals that I researched, I found that there is any number of judges that change very often and that have different backgrounds in filmmaking. This makes any statistic that could be based on these judgments a near impossibility. What I was able to accomplish instead of a statistic was a great deal of information on how the Student Academy Awards and certain film festivals are run and how a film from BYU could compete within these venues.
I also proposed to use the criterion I gathered to analyze successful Student Academy Awards films over the last five years. I was able to attain a good number of the top films at the Student Academy Awards from the last several years. After long hours of analyzing these films I was able to come up with a sort of rubric for creating a film that would satisfy the same ideals and production value that judges of the Student Academy Awards have looked for in the winners of the last few years.
Lastly, I wished to record these discoveries in a format that BYU Media Arts students could use to plan their short films that would be competitive in these film festivals and contests. I came up with a plan to publish a small booklet that I could have placed within the Media Arts offices and labs as well as given to the students who are working on advanced projects this year. This booklet would give them a wealth of knowledge – from resources and information about festivals, to a simple guide that would help the students to create a plan for getting into festivals, what to do once in the festival, and how to continue gaining success from their festival wins. A lot of this information has been gathered by my team and I, with some help from scholarly resources.
The Booklet
The booklet with all of this research has not yet been published and distributed to the several outlets mentioned. My hope is that the booklet will be available to the students within the next few months. There is a bit of a rush on the booklet for the advanced project students since they begin producing their short films beginning in February. The title that we have given the booklet is: The Student to Film Festival Initiative.
My hope is that we can continue adding to this booklet after our experiences at film festivals and other contests. We will gather a lot of information from several alumni that have had experience at the Student Academy Awards and other prestigious festivals.
What’s Next?
The next step for this project will be distribution and extending the research. My hope for the booklet is that we can get it to the graduating seniors of this school year and that they can use it for getting their films out to festivals as soon as possible. I would also hope that we could extend the research to go even further and possibly even create a website in conjunction with the Media Arts department at BYU so that future students would be able to access these resources and continually update the information.
Conclusion
A lot has happened in the last year that has helped me grow. I believe this to have been the most difficult year of my entire academic career. Through all of the trials and difficulties, I feel that I was able to be focused and desirous to accomplish something greater than myself. A lot of the time when I would think about what my research might do for my friends within the program, I felt as if there wasn’t anything that should stand in the way of getting this research done for them. I have had a lot of people tell me I’m crazy – I try and put too much on at one time and I try and make everything perfect but end up stressing myself out. I don’t find this research as a waste of time and I certainly didn’t find it to be too stressful. I felt free to do what I could and I am happy with the results.