Visions Experience 2014

For the Visions Film Festival, I attended the viewing of the 1 hour 1 take competition. I was curious in participating in the event because it sounded like a lot of fun, but I was intimidated. I’m still just a beginner when it comes to filmmaking and I was concerned that I might hold a group back because of my inexperience, so I didn’t sign up to participate. If I had realized it was just a simple thing for fun, shot with an iPhone camera, I would have felt a little more confident. After watching the brief films other festival attendants made in their 1 hour, I wished I had signed up. It really did look like fun. Hopefully I’ll have the option to try it out next year. Voting for your favorite group, was hard though, because there were no credits and all of the group names were colors, so they ran together in the end, making it hard for me to know which one I really did like best over which group name I could actually remember. 

I went to the first film block, as well. There were some really wonderful short films submitted to the festival. I wish I could have seen the second block as well, but unfortunately there were conflicts for me attending at that time. There films I saw were Reel Farewell (documentary), Exposed (experimental), Advice from a Caterpillar (animation), Scoundrel (narrative), Win or Lose (documentary), Boy (narrative/period piece), Peck Pocket (animation), and Caught (narrative). I thought both of the documentaries were done really well. I was really interested in Win or Lose because it was focused on an issue that I really care a lot about, marriage equality. It was heart-warming and sad at the same time. I was also interested in Reel Farewell’s subject about the rapid decline in films made on actual film stock and thus the decline of film projectors and projectionists. This reminds me of a documentary I watched about a similar issue in literature with e-books and the struggles many printing companies have competing with Amazon e-books. While many people will probably still want to read actual paper books, film is something that isn’t thought about as much. There is a similar feeling of nostalgia to film stock as there is when flipping the page of a book, but I don’t think the average movie viewer is going to notice the difference between a film projection and digital projection. It seems to be a much more rapid decline. The film really sparked my interest in wanted to know more about working with film. I thought the choreography in Exposed was beautiful and that the dialogue was very poetic. The filmmaker explained that the dancer in the film had written the monologue which was about the inner turmoil of the dancer’s current relationship. I thought it was interesting to hear about complications with some of the shots, like how the filmmaker was so close to the dancer during filming that at one point the dancer accidently punched the camera breaking the lens! The movement was really amplified by the camera work in this piece. I haven’t seen a lot of experimental films, but I‘d like to learn more about them. I thought Caught was hilarious. I do think that the story might be lost on other generations, but for anyone who was around the age of the characters at the time Pokémon cards were popular, the film was great. In the comments from the filmmakers, someone asked the makers of Boy about complications making a period piece. I can think of so many things that would be difficult about a period piece from set design, to costumes and written dialogue, but what I wouldn’t have thought about was the issue the filmmakers discussed with using the N word. It makes perfect sense that most people would be uncomfortable using that word, creating a challenge for the actors. The filmmaker explained how it took some time for the actors to understand that they are speaking as their character in a certain time period and situation when it makes sense for the characters to use that word. 

I also attended the second conference block at Visions. Students Conor Boyle, Tyler Davis, Brandon Konecny, and Amanda Sonebarger all presented during this block. Conor Boyle talked about the desensitizing and de-eroticizing sex scenes in the film Irreversible. An interesting point he made was about the way the film is told in reverse, and how that creates an unbiased sympathy for the female rape victim of the film. Although I haven’t seen this film, the idea makes a lot of sense to me. To tell the story in reverse, you get to the tragic assault quickly, before you have a chance to know the characters. If you tell it at the end, viewers will develop feelings for all of the characters which could change their opinion of the event, where showing it before these feelings develop would allow the viewer to only see the scene as a violent crime. I haven’t seen this film, but kind of want to now. I’m a bit intimidated by the graphic content of the film, but the plot structure seems very unique to me, kind of in the way that Memento is told. Tyler Davis talked about Avant Guard cinema and as a student, I was interested to learn more about what Avant Guard cinema actually is, for example that it doesn’t follow a linear story or mainstream narrative structure and that it attempts to draw attention to the media. He talked about surrealism in the film In My Skin, Sombre and Irreversible and how certain sex scenes in the films only show certain body parts in an abstract way. Brandon Konecny walked about the existentialist them in the film The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Again, another film I haven’t seen based on a book I haven’t read. It was still interesting. As a writer, I was particularly interested in what he had to say about the adaption of the screenplay. The film was criticized for lacking the essayistic asides of the narrator in the book. Someone asked him about the possibility the filmmaker could have had to insert the narrator somehow, but Konecny wasn’t sure how it would have affected the film. Amanda Stonebarger talked about two films, one of which, Pan’s Labyrinth, I had actually seen. Stonebarger made comparisons of the two films (also The Sweet Hereafter) and the use of fairy tales and storybooks in the response to trauma. I like to write, and because of this, I found her lecture of the narrative similarities between the two stories interesting. She noted how in both films, the heroine switches rolls between the story teller and the story subject. To me it seems that framing certain fantasies in a story told by the character can help retain reliability for the filmmaker and believability in the story. Because I have seen Pan’s Labyrinth a few times, I could really take in a lot more of Stonebarger’s lecture than I had with the other speakers. She discussed the conflict between the female character and opposing male dominating figures. I also never noticed the little details in the film linking the main character, Ofelia, to certain fictional characters like Alice, Snow White and Dorothy through her clothing. 

I truly enjoyed going to the film festival, particularly the opportunity to see some outstanding student films from UNCW and other universities. I really wished I could have gone to more events, and next year intend to participate even more in the Visions Film Festival. I thought it was a lot of fun. (Though I did hear a rumor that it didn’t used to cost any money to attend, which as a broke college student I need every dollar I can save. I just wanted to mention this because last semester for my Creative Writing major I was required to attend UNCW’s Writer’s Week, which had even more speakers and events taking place throughout the entire week, also open to the public, but it was all free. I just didn’t understand why this event had to cost money to attend.)