Student films win esteem in national festivals

As gears churn and a silver hand moves through fog, two bird-headed statuettes strain against a choke chain; their enslaver has a similar build, but possesses a head of scrap metal instead.

For Paul Alvarez, a graduate student in the University of Montana’s Media Arts Department, the imagery serves to capture the “struggles of the lower working class” in his awarding-winning short film, “Kamp.”

Last month, “Kamp” won the Best Animation award at the 41st Humboldt Film Festival in Arcata, Calif. Alvarez’s film was one of nearly 60 chosen from a pool of over 2,000, and one of nine chosen in the category of Experimental/Animation.

Stop motion refers to the animation technique that involves a frame-by-frame altering of an object in order to convey motion. As a stop-motion animation piece, “Kamp” took an incredible amount of time and effort on Alvarez’s part, as well as those who helped him shoot it.

“The set took me over 100 hours or so, and that was just pretty much solo for me,” Alvarez said. “For every three hours that we shot, we probably picked up about 20 good seconds of footage.”

“Kamp” clocks in at just over three-and-a-half minutes.

Despite the narrow field of featured films at the festival, Alvarez wasn’t the only UM student who screened his stop-motion work.

Tawana DeHoyos, a senior in business management also received recognition by the festival for her piece, “Envy.” DeHoyos said it took her less than a day to shoot “Envy” as she used simpler stop-motion techniques and received help during the filming. She said she made the film for class credit, and didn’t expect anything further than that.

“I just did it to do it,” DeHoyos said. “It was just a doll on a pedestal. Turned out they (the festival’s film selectors) liked it.”

Alvarez and DeHoyos aren’t the only UM students meeting with off-campus success for their film work. Nicholas Jenkins, a media arts grad student, has garnered notoriety for his piece “What Love Remains,” which was recently recognized at the Seattle Science Fiction Short Film Festival.

The film cost just over $300 to make, a budget significantly less to that of the other films at the Seattle festival. Despite this, Jenkins remained positive about his work.

“I was very confident because I knew what the film was,” Jenkins said.

Although “What Love Remains” didn’t receive any awards, Jenkins remained proud of his film, which tells the tale of a man building an android version of his dead wife.

“I was pretty happy with my little film,” Jenkins said.

Alvarez and Jenkins will screen their films in the University Center Theater on May 7 and 8, respectively, as part of the Media Arts Graduate Student Screenings.

First year graduate students will screen their films at 7 p.m. followed by second year grads at 8:15 p.m. Third year graduate students will hold screenings for their theses on May 8, also in the UC Theater. Admission is free.