On Saturday, January 26, Bear River’s Video Club, under the leadership of Media Arts teacher Christina Levinson, sent two teams to Center High School in order to compete in the 6-Hour Film Festival. The more advanced team of the two, which consisted of senior Ashley Darr, senior Andrew Johnston, senior Hunter Smith, junior Josh Racine, junior Wes Conley, junior Arieal Swindell, and junior Sebastian Carranza, won first place.
What is the 6-Hour Film Fest?
“The 6-Hour Film Fest is a little festival at Center High School where multiple schools come down and are given a prompt and some info they must put into making their video,” said Conley. “Once they are given this, the teams have six hours, on the dot, to film, edit, and export their video.”
This year’s prompt was “High School Nightmare,” and the teams were required to incorporate a garage sale sign into their film.
According to Swindell, there is so much that goes into the making of a film that the team felt crunched on time.
“A team of up to eight has only six hours to create a whole film idea, shoot it, edit, and export,” said Swindell. “It doesn’t sound like a lot, but it definitely is a time crunch when most decent films take a week to create.”
To the disappointment of many Bruins, Video Production Courses were put on hiatus this year to make room for the new Graphic Design course.
“It was really fun to hang out with my video buds again, since the class didn’t happen this year,” said Conley.
With having to train in a video club instead of a full blown class, the team felt a little unprepared and hoped for the best.
“Since there is not actually video class, we really did not prepare that much this year,” said Darr.
According to Conley, it’s hard to prepare in general for these types of competitions when you don’t know the prompt.
“It’s hard to prepare for the competition, due to the fact that you aren’t given any information until just before you start filming,” said Conley. “So all you can really do is bring your equipment (cameras, mics, editing software, etc) and just hope you can think of a good story.”
The video crew was very surprised and excited by the win.
“So the announcer called the second place team up, and the judge in the back of the room said ‘Who was your guys’ editor?’” said Darr. “Three people from the team raised their hands. The judge says ‘I need to talk you you guys after the ceremony … because you guys are hired!’ and, because of that statement, I thought we weren’t going to win. But when the announcer said that Bear River got first, we just kind of sat there in awe. He’s like, ‘Uh, you guys can come up now.’ Long story short, we were all so surprised that we won, but, at the same time, we weren’t.”
“I feel very excited about winning, because of the fact that this is my third year of the 6-Hour Film Fest and I have not gotten so lucky in previous years,” said Conley.
Mrs. Levinson expressed her feeling about winning.
“I was super excited when Bear River took first place in the ‘experienced’ category,” she said. “In my three years at Bear River our team has never taken the top spot. The video kids are awesome.”
