Lights. Camera. Action!

Emma Stefanick

Every year, Ohio University’s film school provides graduate students with the opportunity to showcase their work at the Athena Cinema. 

On Saturday, Oct. 15th,  the Athena screened 10, 15-minute  films from second year Master of Fine Arts students, displaying the work of 10 student directors and three editors. The films took over a year to complete, and graduates emphasized the pride they had in their work. 

 Steven Lee worked as the director of photography for the films “Gone Before I Left” by Blaize Hart and “Parared” by Tabitha Kennedy.  

“I personally consider it the main event in any given year,” he says. “I was happy to see the final output of those two that I shot and all other films from my classmates.”

With each film comes a completely different style and storyline. “Gone Before I Left,” Lee says, is a dramatic piece that conveys the relationship between a man, his girlfriend and his mother, whereas “Parared” depicts a character who deals with the loss of his girlfriend through a series of virtual reality simulations. 

Kanat Omurbekov wrote and directed a comedic piece titled “Delivery Man,” while Graham Holford’s film, “Pasture” is defined by Jacob Midkiff, the film’s director of photography, as being very rich in character and taking many forms over the filmmaking process. 

The film, “Applebaum,” directed by Eddie Loupe, describes the story of the last conversation between a terminally ill man, Applebaum, and his nurse, Olivia.  The film, “Alarm,” by Hannah Espia-Farbova is very experimental with split screens, moving shots and performances. 

What makes each of these short films mean so much to their creators is the effort put into every detail. Student filmmaking requires extensive collaboration without the manpower of a professional film studio. 

Photo provided by Steven Lee

“Feature films are made over the course of generally two to three years,” says Loupe. “[At a studio] you might have 50, 60 people working on a movie whereas at our scale, you maybe have ten that help shoot it and then …  it’s maybe one or two that are working on it after it’s shot. So the process becomes extended because there are fewer and fewer people working.”

After shooting comes the extended post-production process. According to Midkiff, post-production editing is what takes the longest time. “We shot [the film] all in a week,” he says, “But the other year and a half of all of that was making the script perfect and the edit perfect.”

Loupe believes the filmmaking process is much like fencing in slow motion; As time goes on, you must continue to make moves without knowing what the result of those moves will be until the end of the match. During the production process, decisions are made, but until the film is shown two to three years later, the director can never really be sure how the work is going to be received by an audience. 

“[Everything] is various degrees of fun or stressful or miserable,” Loupe says. “but the best part is sitting down with an audience and them being into the movie.”