By Jayson Edgerle
Reporter
Film Club members held a Mini Film Festival on April 10, featuring films the members themselves had produced. The six short film projects were shown in the Student Union with popcorn and soda.
There were many challenges in putting on the Film Festival. Leonard Garcia, 23 and the president of the Film Club, described the experience.
“It’s the first event that I was put in charge for,” Garcia explained. “I’ve worked on one event before, since I became president, but that event was much smaller. It didn’t really have full length mainstream movie, playing along with our short films. But we wanted to get a bigger crowd going to our films. So, I figured we do something different, actually getting the rights to a film and play that after our short films.”
Getting the rights to play such a movie proved to be more difficult than Garcia had anticipated.
“It was actually more strenuous than I expected. Mainly because we need to get funding approved through ASI and once we got that approved, we needed proof that we are able to get the rights to the film,” Garcia recalled. “And that was a back-and-forth all through out with ASI, it was a bit hectic to get everything done and we finally got everything done this week. So, our announcement and all this ended being done a bit more last minute than we expected.”
One of the directors, Jacob Cota, a music major, explained the experience he had making one of his projects called “A Deal with a Demono”, which is available to watch on the club’s YouTube page.
“First thing you’ve got to do is find your actors for it,” Cota said. “It’s honestly hard to turn people down because there were so many people were very good for the role, but you have to pick. The good thing is when you have good actors that audition for a movie, when they are all good, there’s no real loss if you pick a certain actor.”
Serena Ane Fuentes, a business major, who acted in one of Cota’s projects, shared her experiences working on the project.
“It took a while to start it at first because we had to figure out everyone’s schedule,” Fuentes said. “And we were slowly learning the dialogue for the script. And honestly, it was a pretty fun process once we started getting into it because we were still figure it out the first time we went out to go practice it and the second time we went out we found our primary location. It was fun.”
The event began with a documentary on The Bakersfield Burrito Project, a volunteer group that makes burritos for the homeless. Following that was the short film “Before the Roses Die”, where a guy has to tell his girlfriend that he isn’t British before the roses he gave to her die. Next was a documentary called “Writing in the Spotlight”, which covered a gay student’s dream to become a writer.
Then, there was City Life, which was various shoots across town. Following that was “Shovel Talk”, which tells the story of man kidnapped by someone he once called a friend. The last student film, “Barbaric”, shows the struggle between a spy and his integrator. After those were finished, they put on a major movie called “The Big Sick”.
