FTVM 236 Audiovisual Festival Celebrates Student Work

For the second year in a row, students in FTVM 236 were asked to create an audiovisual essay (approximately three to five minutes long) for their final project that posed an argument about one of the audiovisual works that was screened in its entirety for FTVM 236 during the term.

The instructors, Matthew Solomon and Vincent Longo, left the terms of the assignment intentionally general to promote the creative audiovisual presentation of original arguments. Students were free to choose any clips from the films and manipulate them (edit, crop, freeze-frame, zoom, annotate, diagram, et al) in ways that best supported their argument. In order to make their argument, students used voiceover narration and/or on-screen text, while employing terms and critical approaches they learned about in this class.

The Audiovisual Essay Festival, held on December 12, 2017, in Angell Hall's Auditorium A, was co-hosted by last term's grand prize winner Alexandra Niforos and Professor Emeritus Frank Beaver. The audience of FTVM 236 students cast their votes for "the best of" in several categories. Please see a list of winners below. 

Stills taken from Badlands, The Hole, Do the Right Thing, The Shining

Audiovisual Festival Award Winners - 2017

• Best of Festival: Alexandra Owens, “What’s Wrong with Buggin’ Out?”
• Best Original Argument: Alexandra Owens, “What’s Wrong with Buggin’ Out?”
• Most Entertaining to Watch: Bradley Gurwin, “The Shining.”
• Best Editing: Sydney Bentley, “Birdlands.”
• Best Use of Text: Lauren Colburn, “This is an Audiovisual Essay about an 
       Audiovisual Novel.”
• Best Sound Mixing and Editing: Bradley Gurwin, “The Shining.”
  
  Special Commendations: 
  
  
• Jakob Sheridan, “Roaches in Love.” 
• Justin Fineberg, “A Badboy in the Badlands."
• Kevin Guo, “The Role of Water in The Hole.” 
   

PhD student and GSI Vincent Longo comments about the festival:

"This year we required HD video and professional-quality sound recording for all audiovisual assignments. We knew this would improve the technical quality of the assignments, but we could never have predicted the marvelous creative and analytical work this cohort of students produced. This was true even for students’ work that did not make the festival, which for time constraints is limited to eighteen contenders. When choosing my six-contenders from my sections this became immediately evident  when I realized that my “short-list” included 15 out of 40 submissions; and the rest were not far off!