Campus Moviefest is “the world’s largest student film festival”, an annual competition that travels from campus to campus around the country. Students are given one week to produce a film and an awards ceremony and finale screening are held on the final day. Winners go on to compete in larger national and international brackets with the chance to have their work screened by top industry professionals and executives.

CMF came to the University of Alabama in January this year. In lieu of producing our own project, we teamed up with filmmaker Xavier Burgin of Que the Lights to work on his film I.F. , a drama about a little girl who has an imaginary friend who helps her to cope with a tragic loss. You can read his post about the movie here. Lindsey and I edited the film and I served as visual effects supervisor on several shoots. Xavier had a few VFX shots in mind when he wrote the script, and my job was to make those effects happen. I’ll blog in more detail about those effects at a later date.

Here’s a blooper take!

It was a whirlwind production with shoots on virtually every day of the production week. We were editing in tandem with the shoots, ingesting new footage immediately after each day wrapped and bringing it all together piece by piece until it was finished. There were many sleepless nights and we were racing against the clock on the final day, bringing in our completed cut within the last hour before the deadline.

The DP on this project was Greg Kubik (that guy knows his way around a DSLR) and the original score was written by the multi-talented Rae Marshall (also featured in the Fstoppers contest entry we produced a couple of months ago). Working as producer was Matthew Cocozza, who coincidentally also served as producer on the T.V. pilot “Goodnight Mrs. Malaprop, Wherever You Are” with Tom Cherones of Seinfeld fame. I worked as camera operator on that project and will also blog about it at a later date. We just wrapped that pilot around 2 weeks ago.

I.F. was selected as a top 16 film and screened at the finale. It was one of three films nominated for “Best Drama”, but didn’t win. However, the film did go on to win the “Wild Card” prize, thanks to everyone who shared and watched the film online, meaning it will now compete in a higher online bracket with a chance to go on to the finale in Hollywood. You can watch the film below. Enjoy!