When the last bell rings and school is finally out for the summer, many kids run home, kick their feet up in front of the TV and stay there for the next two and a half months. The kids at the Austin Film Festival Summer Film Camp do quite the opposite: They go back to school to learn how to make the programs their peers may someday watch on TV.
“Roll camera. Camera rolling,” Maria Etienne calls from behind the lens of a camcorder. “Action,” follows Andoni Almeida. The scene begins.
Six students film a classroom scene in their original short film, under the working title “Murder in the Bathroom.” The film is about a girl who accidently murders her best friend while whacked-out on prescription drugs and is later shocked to find she, in fact, is the killer.
In the last four days, the group worked together to write, edit and film its short movie. Before this week, none of them had any experience in film.
“Right now, I’d probably be watching ‘The O.C.,’” said Kidd Snyder.
Snyder, 13, directs “Murder in the Bathroom.” She sits beside script writer Ari Polgar, 13, and occasionally interjects.
“I tell her my ideas and she adds the details,” Snyder said. The pair works on the final script as the crew and actors explore the school, taking test shots and exploring creative angles. At the end of the two-week camp, their own original short film will be complete.
For seven years, the Austin Film Festival has hosted film camps for kids. The campers are sorted into age groups and learn a host of skills in their one- or two-week intensive day-camp. Programs offered during the summer include Claymation, Script-to-Screen, Special Effects and Funny Shorts. Located at McCallum High School, the campers are given free reign to shoot anywhere they can gain access in the school.
The camp uses the equipment, including computers, cameras and the expansive green room, from the schools’s film program.
“We have kids bring stuff from home and work with other kids to come up with costumes,” said Alissa Ziemianski, director of the Young Filmmakers Program. “But it’s not about the acting or the costumes. We want the kids to learn to use the equipment, work together and finish their film,” she said.
It also takes advantage of the school’s lack of renovations to provide settings for the films — the school was built in 1953, and few changes to the halls and classrooms have been made.
“It pretty much looks the same as when students were walking through these halls years ago,” Ziemianski said. “It’s great for students to shoot films set anywhere in the past 50 years because the look of the school doesn’t really commit to any period.”
After the camps are over, the student films get showcased both in August screenings at the Regal Arbor Cinema and later on local Time Warner Cable channels. Campers also get to keep DVDs of their films.
All the counselors are young, and many are UT radio-television-film students — just as eager as the kids to use their educations to create actual films. The Austin Film Festival also employs 25 interns, who help out with the program.
Jacquelyn Andrews, UT liberal arts junior, and Ashley Arechiga, radio-television-film senior, serve in the program. On the first day of camp, they helped with the claymation class.
“First, we had them come up with their own classroom rules, and then we brainstormed,” Arechiga said.
By the end of day one, the campers learned how to transform clay models of their names into dragons and penguins and animate the action using iStopMotion.
“This is how Gumbie was made!” Arechiga said, as she showed the program the kids had used earlier that day. With a few taps of the space bar, she animated a short film of her hand dancing across the screen. “There’s something magical about making something inanimate move. It’s instant gratification.”
When the students toss around terms like “cross-fade” and “over-the-shoulder shot,” it’s easy to forget that it’s kids, not professionals working on the films. But the posted list of rules in the classroom brings things back to reality: The story can only be one minute long. It must have a beginning, middle and end. No zombies or aliens are allowed, but mutants are okay as long as they’re the villains.
What: Austin Film Festival Summer Film Camp
Where: McCallum High School
When: Camp sessions run through August 7
Info: www.austinfilmfestival.com
