Explorations Project: How to Apply to Film Festivals
“How can you find, explore, and/or expand your passion?”
For our final junior freestyle project, Explorations, we were tasked to learn a new skill related to our respective electives. I chose to learn about how to apply to film festivals. I decided to do this because I felt like my narrative film and my peers’ animations and films were good enough to be submitted to student film festivals. We never really learned about film festivals, applying was just something we knew we could do but not something we knew how to do. I thought making a presentation and a how to video would be very useful for everybody as we had already put in the hard work of making our pieces of art.
My process for my explorations project was researching the history of festivals and how to apply, applying to film festivals, making my presentation, and finally, sharing it with my classmates and teachers.
For the history of film festivals, I included a brief history and the impact of certain film festivals. The Venice Film Festival is credited as the first film festival, starting in 1932. This festival was made to showcase a diverse range of international films. It would later inspire the creation of festivals like Cannes Film Festival (1946) and the Berlin International Film Festival (1951). The five most famous festivals are known as the “Big Five” – Venice, Cannes, Berlin, Toronto, and Sundance. I mentioned that COVID-19 significantly changed many festivals as many include virtual or hybrid options.
Applying to film festivals was surprisingly straightfoward. I would like to thank FilmFreeway for being such an organized and helpful website, making the application process much smoother and more efficient. I applied to both the All American High School Film Festival, which holds its Teen Indie Awards Show in NYC, and the Nashville Film Festival, which holds its NextGen Student Competition.
Making my presentation was basically taking the research I had done, both from websites and from my own application process, and putting them into slides. The only new part I had to do was record a “how to” video on applying to film festivals. Once I had the video, putting together the slides was a smooth process
Lastly, I shared my research and advice with my classmates. The presentation can be seen below.
Reflection:
I am happy that I was able to educate my peers on how to apply to film festivals because they create really impressive stuff and they should be applying to get recognition from a wider audience. For myself, I am excited that I have applied to a couple festivals and I am hoping to get the experience of showing my film to an audience outside of our community. Overall, I think this was useful information for everyone at freestyle, myself included, and I am glad that I spent my final junior project doing this.
Music Recording
The purpose of the music recording project was to learn how to use the brand new music studio on the Freestyle campus. Since I am not very musical, I partnered up with my friends Charlie and Evan because strength in numbers. We decided to make a cover of “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey. The recording process was a little bit confusing but Mr. Flo helped guide us through the process and we ended up being able to each record an instrument. I am glad I learned the basics for how to function in the music studio. Now I just need to learn how to play some music.
Artist Statement: For this piece, Charlie, Evan, and I decided to make a cover of All I Want for Christmas is You by Mariah Carey. Unfortunately, we do not have the angelic voices to make this a very good cover, hence the name, but we did learn how to record vocals and instruments in the brand new music studio. I am proud that we were brave enough to sing despite being objectively bad singers. One thing I value from this project is being able to be a little less intimidated by the amount of things in the recording studio. I now kind of understand how to work different things in the studio, now I just need to learn how to play some instruments.
Lyrical Essay
The definition of a lyrical essay is quite loose. According to Writers.com, a lyrical essay is “an advanced literary form whose only rule is to break the rules.” Basically, you have creative freedom to write in any way you want. For our lyrical essay, we had this freedom, but we were encouraged to use footnotes creatively, incorpurate research into our essays, and create a annotated bibliography. I chose to write my lyrical essay about my house in Ohio that makes me feel intense nostalgia every time I visit.
Because it only feels right, here is a bonus video of Dan Hill in the rain: