2010 SUNYWide Film Festival: April 15-17

Every Friday since October, members of the Media Arts Club have spent an hour with the Boys & Girls Club in Dunkirk. During these visits they’ve molded a lot of clay, but it hasn’t been for the sake of arts & crafts. Here’s a hint: the second annual SUNY-Wide Film Festival is right around the corner.

“A new element we’re going to add this year is having the Boys & Girls Club claymations screened Saturday at 3 p.m.,” said senior Joe Lopez, president of Media Arts Club. The Media Arts Club has embraced the kids’ creativity, doing the camerawork but otherwise letting their imaginations run wild.

“They made their own characters, they made backgrounds, and then they made stories,” Lopez said. One narrative involved Michael Jackson moon dancing on the moon and getting hit by a meteor. “Some of the stories were changed multiple times when they were doing it,” Lopez said.

Lopez hopes the festival will attract added members of the community this year.

“It’ll be really nice to see the kids come and the parents come and see the work they’ve been doing after school. And hopefully it’ll inspire them to come on the other days or even consider doing something in media arts.”

The screening of the claymations begins at 3 p.m. Saturday in Jewett 101. This is but one small aspect of the festival, hosted by the Media Arts Club under adviser Phil Hastings. The festival begins at 8:30 p.m. Thursday with its feature film, Engi Wassef’s Marina of the Zabbaleen (2008), sponsored by the Fredonia Sustainability Committee.

Marina of the Zabbaleen, a documentary, markets itself as “the first feature film ever made about the hidden lives of the Zabbaleen people.” The film won second place for “Best Documentary” at the Dubai International Film Festival in 2008.

“It’s a film about a girl [seven-year-old Marina] growing up in a town in Egypt,” said Pat Depuy, treasurer of Media Arts Club. The Zabaleen village, located in Cairo, exists as a garbage-collecting village following a swine flue outbreak. The pigs, now removed, had been responsible for disposing of the village’s garbage. “If the garbage doesn’t get eaten it piles up and the quality of life is just drops hardcore,” Depuy said.

Friday will feature a 6:30 p.m. screening of guest juror Tricia Regan’s Emmy award-winning documentary “Autism: The Musical.” Lopez and Dallas Greene, vice president of Media Arts Club, met Regan in October at the Disability Film Festival at the University at Buffalo. The screening of “Autism: The Musical” was followed by a Q & A with Regan.

“We approached her afterwards and I asked if she was interested in possibly being out guest juror, and she loved the idea immediately,” Lopez said.

While there is no official theme this year – last year’s was “firsts” -- the festival does have a mascot. Pat Depuy, treasurer of Media Arts Club, said the octopus seen on the Film Fest’s posters is a metaphor for reaching out to other schools. Students from Old Westbury, Hudson Valley Community College, Oneonta, Stony Brook, Brockport, New Paltz, Purschase, University at Buffalo, SUNY Buffalo and Oswego all submitted films. Of the 82 entries, 19 films were selected to be screened during Saturday’s Student Competition Showcase, beginning at 8:30 p.m. There was a slight $5 entry fee, and submissions were accepted in four different categories: Animation, Documentary, Narrative and Experimental.

Among the films featured Friday will be “Illumination,” a stop-motion animation created by Fredonia students Erich von Hasseln, Brandon Prinzi and Heather Personett. The film is “about a man who is very isolated, at the end of civilization,” said Von Hasseln, a senior animation and illustration major. “And he encounters this unusual guest. The unusual guest is kind of a fateful encounter because through helping the unusual guest he’s able to reconnect with something that he’s lost.”

The three began work on “Illumination” in the fall as a project for 3-D Computer Animation with Jill Johnston-Price. They have spent over six months working on the video, which is only minutes long.

“Stop-motion refers to a particular kind of animating where – we built a 3-d set and a 3-d character – and basically we have a camera and every footstep that character needs to take we need to animate one frame at a time,” von Hasseln said.

Not including the camera, which was provided by the school, the budget for “Illumination” was less than $25 as the three used mostly recycled materials.

“The wood floors...those were just pieces of cardboard dirtied up with chocolate and stained with wood stain,” von Hasseln said.

Von Hasseln brought up familiar examples of stop-motion filmmaking like Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and Suzie Templeton’s rendition of Peter and the Wolf (2006).

“To see our work transcend to a more professional level, to be able to emulate the equipment that other studios have with what we had was actually really, really cool.”

Francis Toriaga, another senior animation & illustration major at Fredonia, will have his cut-out animation featured in Friday’s student showcase. “Bahay” is an “animation through the life cycle of a coconut,” Toriaga said. “But it’s a metaphor, basically.”

“Bahay” is inspired by Toriaga’s journey from the Phillipines to America. “I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere. I’m Phillipino, I moved here when I was nine, and I haven’t been back.” In the animation, the coconut goes from island to island, and its seeds spread to make hybrid coconuts.