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Redstone Festival accepts video, draws cutting-edge student films

By David J. Craig

In creating the 24-minute political satire Legalized America, filmmaker Michael Ball used cutting-edge digital editing techniques to create a colorful and wildly sarcastic collage, featuring several minutes of computer animation and numerous psychedelic sequences that simulate television commercials and visual culture from different eras.

"I shot onto more than 10 different types of film because a lot of the segments are supposed to be from different time periods," says Ball (COM'02), who graduated from the College of Communication with a master's degree in film last May. His is one of five films that will be shown at this year's Redstone Film Festival, the University's annual competitive showcase for products of its film program. "One film stock I used was high-speed news film made in the early 1980s. I got it from a doctor who used it to study patients' rapid eye movement.

It gave me just the effect I was looking for -- really crappy. I got some great imperfections."

Yet precisely because of its technical ambition, prior to this year Legalized America could not have been entered at the Redstone, because like many student film festivals, it traditionally has accepted only 16-millimeter film print, the industry standard. But filmmakers who use a considerable amount of special effects or animation must transfer their raw footage from 16-millimeter film print to a digital format during editing. Putting the product back to film print is an extremely expensive and time-consuming process. Ball's film, for instance, cost him about $30,000 and took two years to make, and transferring it back to film print would cost an additional $12,000 and take several more months.

"If a filmmaker makes a short film that's going to be shown primarily at small festivals, there isn't a lot of incentive to spend thousands of dollars to make another film print," says Charles Merzbacher, a COM associate professor of film and television, who is codirecting this year's festival. "We knew we were missing out on a wide range of films, because we could see that students in our classes were doing great work with digital graphics and manipulating images but weren't able to submit their work, so this year we felt it was incumbent upon us to open the festival up to videotape submissions."

Accepting videotapes requires renting a state-of-the-art video system for the Tsai Performance Center, which costs several thousand dollars. It is being underwritten by the festival's sponsor, Sumner M. Redstone (Hon.'94), CEO and chairman of the board of Viacom. "The look of this system is going to blow people's socks off," Merzbacher says. "It doesn't look like the large-screen televisions you see in sports bars, which have a TV-quality picture. The picture on this system is very similar to that of film print."

Merzbacher says that screening videotapes resulted in a boost in submissions this year because films made years ago but excluded from previous festivals were included, making the Redstone festival more competitive than ever. Each year the festival gives out thousands of dollars in awards, and it has helped propel the careers of filmmakers such as Gary Fleder (COM'85), director of Kiss the Girls, Scott Rosenberg (COM'85), who wrote the screenplays for Con Air and Beautiful Girls, and Mighty Ducks screenwriter Steve Brill (COM'84).

"This really is a golden age in BU film production, as we have a lot of very good films coming out right now that use state-of-the-art digital techniques," says Merzbacher. "Being able to accept films that wouldn't have been included before makes this kind of a special year."

The Redstone Film Festival will be held at the Tsai Performance Center, at 685 Commonwealth Ave., on Wednesday, February 20, at 7 p.m. Awards will be decided by a jury of Boston-area film critics and curators: Dorothy Aufiero, principal of Scout Productions; Bo Smith, head of the Museum of Fine Arts film program; and Lyda Kuth, director of LEF New England, a private foundation that supports the arts. The festival is free and open to the public.

15 February 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations