Congratulations!!!

Congratulations, Corinne Abbiss and Laura Fawks -- you're the first (current) Malone Film Students to successfully complete a KICKSTARTER project!






Check out their cool cool project here.

Glenoak Film Fest Opportunity

The 2012 GlenOak 5 Minute Film Festival is right around the corner.  We'd like to invite you and your students to enter the contest.  All the details are posted at the festival website.

There are several important changes this year that we hope will make the festival even better.

1)No Entry Fees - We're going to scale back a bit on prizes and trophies and we've decided to waive the fee. Students may submit as many entries as they'd like at no cost.
2)Specific Categories - students will select and compete in 3 categories.
3)2 weeks to complete movies - this year the contest will last for 2 weeks.  This should help more students complete their films and should ease conflicts for college students and avoid spring break and other issues that might arise.
4)Teachers - By request of several of our teachers - this year we'll feature films produced by teachers and staff members  - should be fun and I hope several of you will give it a shot.
5)Projects submitted to dvd.  This should help us avoid file compatibility issues which prevented us from playing one of the college submissions last year.

Contest will begin on January 30th when the prompts will be released on the web site and all films must be submitted before 6pm on February 10th.

Grant Contest Deadline Extended

Because the added step of creating a KICKSTARTER project does demand time and effort -- and because students are nearing the end of the semester -- we're postponing the Grant Deadline til next Friday, December 9th at midnight.

Please touch base with Andrew Rudd if you have a grant application in progress.

Announcing the new Kickstarter Initiative

Are you making a film for the Open Frame Film Fest this year?  If so, you're probably eligible for a production grant (or mini-grant) from the Communication Arts Department. 

We've moved our grant request deadline to November 30th at midnight, so there's still time for you to apply.

Because there are so many (meritorious) films in the mix this year already, we’re planning on funding projects ranging from $100 mini-grants to (potentially) $1000 grants.  This year, the Open Frame Film Fest will fund projects based on similar criteria to previous years. 

This year, we are asking students to pitch their projects to us by making their own KICKSTARTER  projects.  The amount of funding you request from the Communication Arts Department grant should only be HALF (or less) of the total funds you try to raise for your kickstarter project.   

Whether or not your kickstarter project is successfully funded will NOT affect your funding from our department, but in order to apply for funding at all, you MUST prepare and submit a kickstarter project. 

We believe that crowd-sourcing and developing an audience for your short film across the lifecycle of your production process will be an important part of media production regardless of context in the new-media environment where we live, so we view this new step in pre-production to be a key part of your educational experience. 

So get started!  Review the criteria we'll use to judge the projects,  check out a bunch of kickstarter pages (you may want to check out indiegogo pages too, though we recommend kickstarter because of their fee structure) , and then go ahead and make your own.  

Production mini-grant and grant applications will be due on November 30th by midnight.  

Criteria for Judging the Open Frame Grant Project

To be funded, a film project must meet the following criteria: 

1. The film must be submitted to the Open Frame Film Festival.  Receipts will be paid out upon submission of the final film. 

2. All expenses must be approved beforehand (in budget form) by Open Frame director, Andrew Rudd. 

3. Reimbursement may only occur with a receipt.

4. Grant applications will not exceed $1000. 

4. only 30% of a film’s budget may be spent on food / craft-services.

5. only 30% of a film’s budget may be spent on props or costumes (exceptions can be made in the case of period films).  

6. only 30% of a film’s budget may be spent on gasoline.

7.  up to 100% of a film’s budget may be spent on payment to professional crew or equipment rental.

8. Only films with at least three Malone students involved in key roles are eligible for funding.

Grants will be awarded based on these criteria, and priority will be given based upon these additional criteria: ;

• This film and production will exemplify the Malone University Mission (and Foundational Principles) and the Mission of the Communication Arts Department.

• This film script and production proposal demonstrates excellent creativity and vision.

• This film will allow a very significant number of Malone students to gain filmmaking experience and contribute to their learning experiences.

*in cases when other factors are relatively equal, upperclass students will have a slight advantage over lower. In such cases, seniors would have the most advantage.

The grant selection committee will include Communication Arts Faculty members, Faculty members from other departments on campus, alumni and community filmmakers.

Because we recognize that the kickstarter audience is necessarily broader than the Communication Arts Department and Malone University, you may submit a one page explanation of how your film’s process and product will exemplify Malone’s (& the Communication Arts Department’s) mission.  Otherwise the materials for your grant application should be embedded in your kickstarter page. 

With fifteen alumni volunteering their time and expertise, and nine short film scripts, the 2011 Open Frame Script Competition was off to a great start last week.

I spoke with several of the alumni over the week who expressed how enjoyable it was to read the scripts and how some of the returning judges noticed an improvement in the overall quality of the scripts.

Once all the scores were submitted, six of the top scripts were within two quality points from each other.   And....against the odds the winner....?

Was a tie.

With this many judges giving this much feedback, there's no need to break the tie, we'll just award TWO Open Frame screenplay awards this year.

CONGRATULATIONS to

Corinne Abbiss for SILHOUETTES

and to

David Garwood for FAMILY PORTRAIT.

Your scripts are our winners this year.

Next up?  Pre-production begins.  HOPEFULLY all of these quality scripts will go into production and be showing at the Palace Theatre in April of this coming year.

And hopefully we'll see all of you, web readers at that event, watching these scripts in their final cinematic form.

Student Film Shooting in Canton: looking for cast & crew...

Nate Merritt, Trey Duplain, and Santino Vitale are looking to fill roles for their upcoming short student film; Nate is a sophomore Communications/Film major at Malone University, Trey is a junior English major at Walsh University, and Santino is a burgeoning stop-motion animator (who is still in high school).

The film revolves around Steven, an apprehensive therapist with relationship problems and interesting patients, including a suicidal ice cream truck driver and a man who is sexually-attracted to cartoon rabbits. Steven’s insecurities are rooted in his own psychological issues: he is haunted by hallucinations of a womanizing, cigar-smoking hamster. His problems with women begin to resurface when an attractive female patient steps into his office.
We will be submitting the film to the Canton Film Festival at the beginning of September, so this is an urgent casting call; we will also submit it to the Open Frame Film Festival and other film festivals in the future.

Because of our lack of budget, this is a passion project and the acting will be on a pro-bono basis. Of course, food will be provided on-set and anyone acting will be allowed to use footage for their reel. Filming will take place in the Canton area in early August. We will gladly send a copy of the script upon request, and film reels will be accepted in place of auditions.

We are still casting multiple roles:
-The protagonist, a timid and socially inept 30-something therapist, STEVEN. His waning confidence leads him to seeing a therapist of his own. He also suffers from hallucinations that are brought on by his deceased father’s expectations of hyper-masculinity. Steven is a high-brow bachelor with kind and gentle demeanor.

-A manic pixie dream-girl in her late-twenties to early-thirties, MADELEINE, frequently visits therapists in search of the answer to a problem she cannot define. Her determination to reach the inner layers of her psyche leads her to Steven’s office where her unique sense of style and her own uncertainties catch Steven’s eye. Madeleine is an eclectic blend of fun and sophistication, a combination of Audrey Hepburn and Zooey Deschanel.

-A greying, reformed hippie in her 50’s, DIANE, serves as Steven’s therapist. Though her earthy decor and plethora of pillows makes her look like a witch doctor, her methods of practice are far less savage than chants and shrunken heads. Diane is genuinely concerned with the mental health of her patients.

-An overweight, cigar-smoking patriarch with a sausage-stained wife-beater, STEVEN’S FATHER, is a blue-collar, foul-mouthed bully from Brooklyn in his mid-forties. He is angered by Steven’s inability to live up to his expectations and pressures him to pursue women “like a man.” His poor health is sending him to an early grave. This role takes place during the flashback scene, but would also serve as the voice of TONY, a hamster that personifies Steven’s father and haunts Steven.

-A gawky adolescent around 17, YOUNG STEVEN, lives in fear of his emotionally-abusive father. He only enjoys sitting in his room, playing with his pet hamster. Young Steven is only in the flashback scene.

-A suicidal ice cream truck driver, WILLIE, is under the pressure of his mother to continue on the family business. He is one of Steven’s patients. Willie is a lanky man who is torn between having to endure listening to “the Entertainer” day after day and exchanging money with grubby children or breaking his mother’s heart.

We’re also looking for an editor and a DP. As is the case with the actors, any work done would be pro bono as we have a $0 budget, but we'll definitely feed you and let you use whatever you want for your reel. And if we ever make any kind of profit from it (which we are not expecting to), we would give you a share. We were hoping to film as soon as possible, as our goal is to submit it to this year’s Canton Film Festival (the deadline is 1 September). I’d gladly send you the script so you can look it over and see if this is something you’d be interested in working on.

if you're interested you should email Nate at nemerritt1 at malone dot edu