EMB students take top prize at film festival
Simultaneous bursts of laughter. Collective 'ooohs' and 'aaahs.' Table smacking. Slapping high-fives. They're working hard, but you wouldn't know it to look at or listen to them.
Matt Roser, Mike Mastin and Tyler Reid, all Electronic Media and Broadcasting majors, spend a lot of their time in the newly renovated media lab in the Applied Science and Technology building. They edit and write films and projects, talk through assignments, and some have been known to sleep on the floor, just to get the project done in time.
They aren't getting paid to do any of it, not yet anyway. It's paying off in other ways right now.
Roser and Reid are members of a five-person team that took first place for their short film, "La Maîtrise," at the second annual College Weekend Movie Festival in the spring. Other team members were Jami Patton, Rick Haneberg and Alex Day, while Mastin worked as a grip on the project.
The festival, co-founded by EMB professor Chris Strobel, is open to area schools. This year students from Brown Mackie College, NKU, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati State, Xavier and Ohio Center for Broadcasting all submitted at least one film.
Students formed teams, and each school could enter as many teams as they could support. The teams then drew a genre. All 12 of the submitted films had to include an assigned character and three lines of dialogue. Everything else was up to the student film makers.
"They were very secretive," Strobel, who served as an advisor to the three NKU teams, said.
Teams received their conditions and genre on a Tuesday and had until the following Sunday to complete the project, from script writing to shooting.
Films were six minutes long and judged by Mike Bizzarri of On Location Video, Mike Duffey with dB Recording & Sound Design and Terry Lukemire of Barking Fish Lounge.
Of the five possible awards, NKU teams won four of them.
"La Maîtrise was the most ambitious of the other films," Strobel said. "It was the most complete, the highs were higher. That's why they won."
Strobel said the student team in responsible for "La Maîtrise" embraced the project.
It is an assignment for one of his classes, so his students know that they will be participating in the festival.
The team of five had never worked together before on any other project, and that presented some challenges at first. They were a day behind in production to start off.
"I was more excited than anything," Reid said. "We were competing with our classmates, other schools, and we didn't know each other at all."
"I was a little intimidated at first to work with them," Mastin said.
"During the first couple of days, it was hard," Roser said. "But we had to put a roof on a room for filming. We all started having fun together during that. That is what brought us together."
Reid said the talents of the individual team members came out during the project and they all gravitated toward what they were comfortable with. The result was the top prize at the festival.
"To know we were able to accomplish what we did, with our limitations, was a great feeling," Reid said.
Aside from their hard work, dedication and talent, the group attributes Strobel with much of their success, even though he was no more than an advisor on this project.
"We're lucky to have Chris to try and push to get this stuff," Mastin said of the new lab equipment, which has been in use since January.
"There's no way we'd be here without him," Reid said.
The three said that Strobel gives them help in the classroom with techniques and methods, but it's more than that. They said Strobel trusts them to make good decisions, he asks them what they think they need, instead of telling them what to do.
"He's available any time, whether you're in class or not," Reid said. "We can and have called him in the middle of the night with a question, and he's been more than willing to help us."
They're also excited to be working in the new media lab.
"We love it," Reid said.
"The 'wow' factor of the lab is incredible," Strobel said. The new lab has 20 Apple Mac Pro workstations running state-of-the-art software from media powerhouses Apple and Avid, where students can all be working on the same project. The opportunities and methods for teaching change in this type of environment.
"I don't have to go around to each individual student and machine to show them the same thing, we can do it all at once," Strobel said.
He said it allows for more time, more interaction, and more time to make mistakes and play around to get comfortable on the equipment.
"We don't have to worry about throwing the wrong thing away, because we have the storage to keep it all," Strobel said. The lab is equipped with terabytes of storage; before January, Strobel and his students were constantly deleting things because they had no room to keep them.
"To see the investment the university has made in this lab is really special," he said.
There are 10 classes scheduled to use the lab for the fall semester.
Strobel’s group will move on when they graduate from school, working in the media or on a film degree.
He is confident that they will be successful in whatever they decide to pursue.
"I know Tyler plans to go to film school in Chicago, Mike works for Prestige Audio now, Matt does freelance audio," Strobel said. "I could see Matt and Alex Day starting their own company together."
Strobel says he tells freshmen students that if they can think of something else to do with their life, they should probably do it. He's not trying to discourage students early, but he wants them to be sure before they pursue this as a career. "It's hard work," he said. "They need the passion and the dedication if it's going to work."
Whether it's film school or going straight into the media production world, one thing is for sure: the students are ahead of the game thanks to their professor and the experience they gained from working with each other.
