At this year’s AMI Student Film Showcase, aspiring filmmakers and audiences alike will be treated to something special: two nights on the silver screen. All that’s missing is the red carpet.
Under its previous incarnations, Duke University’s Program in the Arts of the Moving Image (AMI) has been holding student screenings since 1986, Josh Gibson, associate director and director of undergraduate studies for AMI, wrote in an e-mail. The program this year has expanded to incorporate more films.
“Last semester we began a tradition of having a jury of faculty and staff vote on the best films in certain categories,” Gibson said. “The screening lasted from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. We decided that this was rather hard on a jury so we spread it out over two nights.”
AMI Production Coordinator Emily La Due was responsible for organizing this year’s jury.
“I’m happy to look at the films and decide which films stand out,” La Due said. “I work with the students all semester, and it’s always a pleasure to see how much they’ve learned and grown as filmmakers.”
The jury will award prizes in the categories of Best Film, Narrative, Experimental, Documentary, Cinematography and Animation.
This fall’s showcase will feature a larger number of films from a larger number of academic classes, further prompting the decision to split the screening into two nights. This demonstrates the cross-media nature of the still-nascent AMI program.
“Though the MFA program will have a focus on experimental documentary and emergent media, the undergraduate program will continue to offer a wide array of classes including, narrative, animation, experimental, documentary and computational media,” Gibson said. “We are committed to the integration of [theory and practice, which] are often separated by discipline or department.”
The showcase will also integrate the work from a Center for Documentary Studies course taught by Gary Hawkins, a visiting lecturer at CDS, as well as one of the department’s capstone projects.
Senior James Lee will be screening two films he worked on during an independent study with Gibson. His experiences making the films—one a sci-fi thriller about mind-reading glasses and the other a drama about a girl diagnosed with cancer—exposed him to amateurs and professionals alike.
On the sci-fi film, The Thought Experiment, Lee wrote in an e-mail that he collaborated with Freewater Productions, TalentOne Casting and student musician Mark Thysell, a senior.
In the second production, however, “all the actors and crew members had zero experience in film, so it was fun figuring out various ways to direct effectively on set,” Lee said. “From these [AMI] classes, I learned mostly to notice more things when I’m on a set: namely, the actors’ nuances and capturing aspects of their acting that can make a particular character unique and realistic.”
Lee said he has found past showcases both enjoyable and useful to him as a student filmmaker.
“It’s been a good reminder to me that Duke has students who are passionate about making films,” Lee said. “Through these screenings I have become more aware of the different types of talent available on campus—especially actors, actresses and cinematographers—that I can collaborate with in the future.”
But as much as they are learning experiences, the showcase is more about providing a formal recognition of student work.
“The film screenings are there to celebrate the achievement of the AMI students and give an extra reason for these students to work hard on their projects,” Lee said.
Award-winning selections from the AMI Student Film Showcase will be shown at a special awards screening in Spring 2011.
“I am confident that there are going to be some gems,” Gibson said.
The AMI Student Film Showcase will take place Dec. 9 & 10 from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. in Richard White Auditorium. Admission is free and open to the public.
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