SCC's First Ever Film Festival An Impressive Feat

With nearly 100 people in attendance, St. Charles Community College's 1st Annual Film Festival started with a sure fire bang. With films highlighting the lighter side of zombie attacks, a hungover search for a femme fatale, a lottery winner, and an impressionistic look at O' Fallon, MO, the festival was stacked with a keen detail and ripe with youthful originality.

With just under 20 films submitted, 9 winners were chosen. Music video, documentary, experimental/animation, and two shorts categories (one 9 minutes or less, the other 10 to 15 minutes) were the five categories which made up the constituent basis for judging. There was also an audience favorite award.

The evening was broken down into an award show/impromptu carnival, with door prizes, free food and beverages, and a grass roots style organization; the festival was unique as well as genuine.

Thriving on the support of some of our more artistic and talented students (as well as high school students), the crowd turn out and level of interaction and intention was a breath of fresh air on a campus where turn outs aren't always so great.

"It's something that I've wanted to do since I've come here, it has just taken a little while for it to get off the ground," said Darren Osburn, Professor of Communications at SCC. The festival is an idea borrowed from another college, and is supported by Patrick Vaugn, Dean of Humanities, Jordan Mogerman of the Graphic Arts Department, and Hal Berry, Professor of History and Cinema. With a sponsorship from Emerson and an appearance by representatives from WEAREMOVIEGEEKS.COM, the festival itself had a real quality feel to it.

"Emerson is one of the most philanthropic companies in the St. Louis region; they've supported special projects [for SCC] for the past five years…they have an interest in the academic as well as the cultural/artistic side of things," said Edie Kirk, who worked with and brought Emerson onto this project. She was also impressed by the festival itself: "I was blown away…it was excellent."

"We wanted to come and support the festival…and we are actually going to feature all of the winners on wearemoviegeeks.com," said Scott Hutcheson, managing editor and founder of WEAREMOVIEGEEKS.COM. He was there with a colleague to support local independent film making.

There was a level of talent that was ever-prevalent in the films themselves, but there were some stand out moments. A documentary about the history of animation won an award for Stacey Winters and the feature "Mei Artis, Mei Mundus" by Rachel Kingen showed great amounts of potential and ambition in the vein of animation.

The real highlights, though, were those of the shorts category ranging from 10-15 minutes long. "Marty Masterson", a short mock-umentary directed by Anthony Meadows and staring Don Etzkorn, follows the character of Marty, who having just won the state lottery of 130 million dollars, spends it all on one very important thing.

The hilarity lies throughout this short, and was extremely well-executed. The second major standout was "Forget Me Tomorrow", a mystery/intrigue film directed by Nicholas Miller. The film follows a guy waking up with a hangover, trying to find the girl that he met at a party the night before, only to discover that her intentions might not have been so pure. "Forget Me" ended up walking away with best short, and best overall film, two awards which the clever and well thought out feature definitely earned.

The real winners though were the students who got to submit features to be viewed by the general public. "It's pretty cool…I was just hoping that people would get to see it…I don't think anyone's seen anything like [the SCC film fest] before," said Anthony Meadows, director of "Marty Masterson". With a slot and date already set for next year, the SCC Film Festival can only get better, and only move onwards and upwards.