Medicine Hat Student Film Festival

Every year around this time I used to submit my film school projects to various film festivals that caught my attention.  Part of my student experience was about reaching out to different sources for validation and promotion.  It sounds needy, and that's because it was.  I wanted to know that I could find work in video after university, and film festivals proved to be the ideal testing grounds for developing my skills in self promotion.  As it turned out, that was the least of what I got.

The very first film festival I submitted my work to in 2005 was the Student Video Competition portion of the Medicine Hat Film Festival.  It was always a pretty small gathering with no more than 30 or so submissions, but it ended up becoming a testing ground for my work before submitting my projects to bigger student festivals.

I submitted my experimental short, Keys to Existence in the 2005 festival and ended up winning the popular vote for the Audience Choice Award and 2nd place in the video category from the jury vote (the other category was animation).  I still have the small plaques on my wall as a reminder of that competition and what it ultimately lead to. Keys went on to screen at Youngcuts International that year in Toronto, followed up by a digital media festival in South Korea in early 2006.  My success in my hometown festival is what I credit with opening the flood gates to the other venues that I avidly pursued in the few years that followed.

One of the other benefits of the Medicine Hat Film Festival came later in 2007, when Stream Media was one of the key sponsors for the fest.  After returning home to Medicine Hat after university in 2008, I contacted Stream about potential employment opportunities.  My involvement in the festival became my foot in the door, and after a brief interview I was offered a job working alongside a small team to help shoot and edit promotional videos for corporate clients.  It was an amazing opportunity, and the start of a business relationship that I still benefit from today.

I always tell people who ask about my start that I never had a very stable plan after film school, but I had hoped that the film festivals I participated in had helped me cast a big net.  I became really opportunistic, and I jumped at any opportunity that seemed even mildly related to the things I was interested in in the hopes that I could make them even more relevant.  I owe that mindset to the experiences I got from my participation in student film festivals.

The Student Video Competition in the MHFF hasn't run for years now, and it's simply due to lack of sponsorship and organization.  It's a big undertaking, and it does take a lot of work to drum up enough attention to get quality submissions.  It's a shame, because as a student who was just starting out it was a great experience.  Before YouTube, before I ever screened my work at venues outside of Canada, and before I found work as an editor, I shared my work at the MHFF.  

Elizabeth Street School

Constructed in 1912, Elizabeth Street School in Medicine Hat, Alberta was one of several other schoolhouses built in the city in the early 1910s.  In contrast to Connaught and Elm Street, Elizabeth Street School was much smaller.  To my knowledge it was mainly a primary school all of its life before closing several decades ago.  Today the building houses the Gas City Kiwanis Centre. 

In September 1912 the cornerstone for the school was laid in place, although I was disappointed to see that a drain pipe now partially obscures it.  All things considered the old building appears to be in pretty good shape. Elizabeth Street has since become 11th Street, and despite the building no longer being a school, it's nice to see original details like the dome and tall brick chimneys still in place.  It's a beautiful building, however trees obscure most of the view from the street, and given its location in the south flats, if you were like me, you probably weren't even aware it was there.  

Laying cornerstone ca. 1912

School construction ca. 1912

School construction ca. 1912

School nearing completion ca. 1912

Elizabeth Street School ca. 1920s

Ghosting image of my modern shot merged with one from 1912.

Spliced: Pixar Animation

The following comes from my column, Spliced from Volume 47 - Issue 22 of the Carillon (the University of Regina newspaper) from March 2005.

The year was 1995, and I was eleven years old.  My tastes in movies were just being discovered, and needless to say they had not ventured far from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) or Aladdin (1992).  

This of course was all about to change thanks to a little known company at the time called, Pixar Animation, who that year released the first feature length computer animated film known as Toy Story.

I think we all know where this is heading, since chances are you’ve seen at least one of the six smash hit animations Pixar has released in it’s 10 year feature animation relationship with Disney.

What’s exciting about computer animation, is not only the attention to detail and the mimicry of all of the subtleties that reality entails, but it’s a new art form and style of making movies that has really just taken off in our lifetimes. 

Surprisingly, or maybe not to some, George Lucas was responsible for the initial development of the company.  Long story short, the small division that would become Pixar was in its infancy when it was sold.  Had Lucas known how successful it would’ve been, or had it had a bigger purpose at the time, perhaps Lucas wouldn‘t have let it go.

When Toy Story burst into theatres it came to gross nearly $192 million in the US alone.  Clearly, the team at Pixar was on to something and their attention to detail and story was something that audiences were prepared to open their wallets for.

The team continued with the same formula (gasp).  Since there was an unbelievable amount of work being done, much of it being the attention to small details, the Pixar team took their time, and rightfully so, to turn out quality features and stories.

John Lasseter, who had directed Toy Story, then worked with Andrew Stanton in shifting the focus from toys to ants and grasshoppers in the 1998 movie A Bug’s Life.

These new movies were so beautiful to look at, so witty, and so genius that the studio was soon growing at an incredible rate.  Yet, they never lost their focus for telling well thought out stories with an impressive standard of quality.  Each time they pushed their skills further, and have now really become the masters of the computer animation market.

Dreamworks was busy with it’s own animation department at this time, and had Pixar Animation not been so successful, it’s doubtful that Dreamworks would have worked so feverishly to develop competitive films.  They’ve recently shown their abilities, and made history with the tremendously popular Shrek (2001) and Shrek 2 (2004).

Meanwhile, the hits kept on rolling out for the Pixar team with Toy Story 2 (1999), Monsters, Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), and most recently The Incredibles (2004).  What I find I can’t emphasize enough is that these are truly amazing movies about unique subjects and events that are only bettered by the vibrant cartoon colours and the physical depth that the computer animators create in these fictional worlds.

Pixar Animation has slated Cars for 2006, and using the previous films as a guide I have a hunch that it’s going to be awesome.  This film is also going to mark the completion of Pixar’s contractual bindings to Disney, but interestingly, Toy Story 3 has already been announced as a potential project.  Only time will tell how that will unfold.

Things are heating in the computer animation world, but it sure seems likes things are getting better and better.