Inside the University of Idaho Radio-TV Center, UI students Chrissy Winger and Tyler Foltz were hard at work putting together their final short film projects for this year’s Kino Film Festival.
“I have a few more hours under my belt, but it’s(the film is) getting cleaner and closer to what I want it to be,” Foltz said.
Students in the advanced digital media production class participate every year in the film festival to show their work and get critiques. In this class, students produce a short film during the semester, said Denise Bennett, a Journalism and Mass Media (JAMM) professor and class instructor.
Bennett said the curriculum gets students to move from a film concept to the screen and then ideally, they will receive feedback from an audience. At first, students pitch three concepts for scripts and then narrow them down to one idea. Throughout the semester, students are critiqued at milestones until the week before the showing, Bennett said.
“It’s a different experience when they have a general audience,” Bennett said. “The most beneficial thing is to have that feedback.”
Winger was at the Radio-TV Center last week compiling receipts for her production purchases and working out small issues on Final Cut Pro, a movie editing program.
“My film is a drama,” she said. “I wanted to do a story about bullying, because I think it is an important topic. It’s about this kid who’se getting bullied by a bunch of kids in school and others outside of school. He ends up thinking about retaliating.”
Winger said that she sent out a call for a casting crew about a month ago. She posted an advertisement on Craigslist and contacted the Moscow Community Theatre.
“I got an actor from there and they also sent my information through the Lewiston Civic Theatre,” she said.
The majority of volunteers that helped in her production were UI students — most of whom come from the theater department on campus and the production crew is enrolled in relevant JAMM classes, she said.
Winger said this has been her largest project and that she had previously produced other small projects. That criteria made Winger the director of her small film. She was expected to be the overseer and have her crew and actors do all the grunt work for her.
“I’m used to doing a lot of the other jobs — like the camera or audio,” she said. “In this one, I didn’t do any of that. I had to kind of stand back and be the director.”
For this class, students are expected to direct, write and produce, said student Josh Finley.
He is producing a horror film called “Blood Runs Thicker” — a zombie movie that Finley has had struggles with.
“It’s been hard, because you need extras,” Finley said. “It takes lots of people to do a zombie movie. I called in favors. Everyone wants to be in a zombie movie. Well, they say they want to be in them and then it comes to the day.”
He said because he relied on such a big crowd of extras, his scenes didn’t really play out the way he imagined.
Most of Finley’s filming happened outside and the weather caused him trouble during production of his movie, he said.
“You have to be adaptable and be willing to make it work,” Finley said.
Foltz is taking a different approach to his short film. He has been producing a film about a love story between a guy and a girl meeting each other for the first time on the opposite end of a phone call.
In the story, a guy calls in because he is experiencing computer problems and his call is directed to a girl who is supposed to be able to help him work out the problem, Foltz said. Over the phone, they end up talking for hours and fall in love with each other. The movie takes a turn when the phone call is disconnected and they don’t have each other’s contact information.
“They try and call each other back but there are call centers all over the world,” he said.
Foltz said it has been a lot of work for a 7-minute video. He said he has spent a lot of time in the production of the movie and he ran into problems with the audio. But overall, he is happy with how his film has turned out.
Bennett said the Kino Film Festival will give these students a different point of view from a new audience and help develop their own abilities.
The Kino Film Festival will take place at 7 p.m. on April 29 at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre. Admission is free to anyone.
Bryce Delay
can be reached at