Ten VMA students score in national writing contests
April 18, 2012
Seven Emerson students and one recent graduate have won top prizes or scored as finalists in five national writing contests for TV scripts and short film scripts. Two others placed as semi-finalists.
Ivy Film Festival short script competitions
Christian Hunt (graduate students) and Armando Vazquez won top writing awards at the Ivy Film Festival’s awards banquet on April 14. Hunt won the graduate prize for best short film script with her work We Buried Our Spirits and Vazquez won the undergraduate prize for Plop Plop Fizz Fizz.
It was no surprise that an Emerson student won in the graduate category because all three finalist slots went to Emerson students: Hunt, Allyson Sherlock, and Bob Giordani. But Vazquez was the only Emerson student in the finals for the undergraduate category. He said he was shocked when his name was announced at the awards banquet at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
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Emerson swept the Ivy Film Festival’s short script competition for graduate students. The three finalists were (from left) Allyson Sherlock, Bob Giordani and Christina Hunt. Hunt was awarded the top prize at the awards banquet at Brown University. |
“I couldn’t believe it. I honestly didn’t think I’d win. Not for my first script,” he said.
Both Hunt and Vazquez received cash prizes and passes to the Nantucket Film Festival in May.
The Ivy Film Festival was first organized in 2001 to celebrate the work of students at the Ivy League universities. It has since branched out to include students at other colleges and universities. Mike Makowsky, one of the festival’s two competition coordinators, said the festival’s feature-length and short script contests attracted more than 70 submissions this year. He said that “the number of Emerson finalists is a testament to how great your screenwriting program is.”
 Emerson Sophomore Armando Vazquez won the Ivy Film Festival’s short script competition for undergraduate students. Armando plans on filming his winning short later this year. |
All of the students wrote their scripts in Visual and Media Arts Assistant Professor Jim Macak’s graduate and undergraduate courses on Writing the Short Subject.
Acclaim TV writing competition
Several students were recently honored for their TV writing.
Nick Ciarelli ’12 won the Acclaim Film & TV’s fall/winter writing competition for spec scripts of existing TV shows. He won the $500 first place award for his episode of Bob’s Burgers, the animated comedy on FOX, which he wrote in Associate Professor of Visual and Media Arts Martie Cook’s summer course on Writing Television Comedy. He credits the feedback he received from Cook as well as from students in the class for helping him improve the script. Two other seniors, Andreas Ignatiou ’12 and Katherine Scheines ’12, scored as two of the five finalists in a second Acclaim competition for TV pilots for their scripts Bishop and Elemental, respectively. And two additional students, Ross Hansen ’12 (Templeton) and Zachary Ehrlich ’14 (Ramrod), were tapped as semi-finalists in this same competition.
Ignatiou, Scheines, and Hansen all wrote their scripts for Macak’s course on Writing Television Pilots.
Ehrlich wrote his pilot based on a pitch he used to win a pitch competition at the Austin Film Festival Screenwriters Conference last year.
All Sports LA Film Festival
Ben Pepin ’11 won the short script competition at the All Sports LA Film Festival, a festival that honors sports-themed films and screenplays.
Pepin’s comedy Dugout was chosen from nearly three-dozen entries. He wrote the script in Macak’s course on Writing the Web Series and now works as a production assistant in Los Angeles.
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VMA students win script writing competition
April 30, 2013
 Jesse Sheehan '14 and Armando Vazquez '14 won a script writing competition at the 2013 Ivy Film Festival. (Courtesy photo) |
Two Visual and Media Arts students recently won the Ivy Film Festival’s undergraduate shorts writing competition, marking wins for the department’s students for the second year in a row.
Armando Vazquez ’14 and Jesse Sheehan ’14 won the festival’s inaugural television pilot writing competition and were honored at a ceremony April 14 at Brown University in Providence. Vazquez was among the students who won an award last year.
Vazquez won this year for Limbo Lane, a contemporary adaptation of the O. Henry short story Dream. In Vazquez’s short film script, an inmate on death row meets with his old friend, a minister. The two spend the last minutes of the inmate’s life discussing morality, ethics, and the role religion played in their lives.
Vazquez said his parents became very emotional upon hearing he won the Ivy Film Festival award, saying his mother shouted in excitement and his father shed tears.
“Our family has been struggling with several things for the past three years,” Vazquez said, “and I think any good news that I bring back makes him very happy. The fact that I’m succeeding at something he knows I love and that he loves himself… just turns him into a big, mushy faucet.”
Sheehan won for Alt, an animated half-hour comedy in which a scientist travels to an alternate universe, and inadvertently acquires his dream job as a field agent for a secret government organization.
“I loved the idea of parallel universes so I wanted to incorporate that into the plot somehow,” said Sheehan, who compared his pilot to a comedy version of the Fox science fiction show Fringe.
“My parents have always been very supportive of me,” Sheehan said, “but I think this is the first time they realized the quality of my writing has improved from silly videos I made in high school to something that’s actually award-winning.”
Emerson also had three students named finalists in the Ivy Film Festival writing competition: Sophia Youssef ’14, Miller Pipkin ’14 and Jacqeline Sosa ’14 in the categories of undergraduate shorts, graduate shorts, and TV pilot, respectively. Several students also were named finalists in the Acclaim TV writing competition. The students in these competitions wrote their scripts in Associate Professor James Macak's courses: Writing the Television Pilot and Writing the Short Subject.
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Big names from big screen visit College Hill
By MICHAEL WEINSTEIN CONTRIBUTING WRITER Monday, April 16, 2012
Last week, the 11th annual Ivy Film Festival temporarily brought Hollywood to campus. Every year, the Ivy Film Festival features a selection of student films, advanced screenings and Q&A sessions with visiting industry professionals at various venues around Brown’s campus.
Co-Executive Directors Travis Bogosian ’13 and Caleigh Forbes ’13 have worked since last spring with a dedicated team of students to select student films from national and international submissions and to make big names such as rising star Lena Dunham, iconic producer, director and screenwriter Barry Levinson and award-winning actress LauraLinney ’86 readily available to the student body.
Family affair
Following an advanced screening of the first two episodes of her new HBO series “Girls,” writer, director and actress Dunham spoke to a full house in Salomon 101 about sex scenes in her show, misogyny in Hollywood and what it was like working with her family in her feature film “Tiny Furniture.”
Dunham announced at the beginning of the Q&A that her goal was to embarrass her little sister Grace Dunham ’14, who was in the audience and who starred as Dunham’s sister in “Tiny Furniture.”
Dunham, who graduated from Oberlin College in 2008, writes a lot about the difficult transitional period between college and getting a job. In fact, “Girls” opens with Hannah, played by Dunham, at a dinner with her parents, when her mom announces that she will no longer financially support her daughter. The issue was a poignant one for an auditorium full of college students.
“Girls,” also produced by Judd Apatow and Jenni Konner, premiered on HBO Sunday night.
The returning graduate
Last Tuesday, Linney (“The Big C,” “The Truman Show”) appeared before a mostly filledGranoff Auditorium for a Q&A moderated by Lowry Marshall, professor of theatre arts and performance studies, before answering audience questions.
A major theme of the talk was Linney’s cross-medium work. She is experienced with productions on the stage, in film and currently on television in her acclaimed Showtime series “The Big C.” Linney said her capacity to adapt to unfamiliar experiences began during her time at Brown. “My approach to things started here,” she said. “You have to allow yourself to suck so you can learn.”
Linney said she initially had no ambitions for television or film but that she strayed from theater out of curiosity. Answering questions about topics such as dealing with celebrity culture – which she said she was too old to care about – and learning as you go, her humility shone through.
“I hate watching myself,” she said. “I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, which is inconvenient when you’re the producer of your own TV show.”
Linney admitted that she did not party much at Brown because the party scene scared her. But she said being back on campus was an emotional experience, and she told the audience, “You have no idea how lucky you are to be here.”
Found footage
The festival premiered an advanced screening Thursday night of Oscar-winning TV and film producer, director, screenwriter and actor Barry Levinson’s (“Rain Man,” “Good Morning Vietnam”) new documentary-style horror movie “The Bay,” which is still in post-production.
The showing, which took place at Avon Cinema last Thursday, was a rare opportunity for about 100 students and Providence locals to view an unreleased film as an unfinished product.
Levinson even apologized at the beginning of his Q&A following the movie screening for the messy sound dynamics, a subtlety that did not detract from the film.
“The Bay,” originally conceived as an actual documentary and inspired by the statistic that 40 percent of Chesapeake Bay is a dead zone, is a found footage horror film about Isopodsthat literally eat the citizens of a quiet New England town from the inside out. Levinsonteamed up with some of the producers of “Paranormal Activity,” one of the films that sparked the recent popularity of the found footage genre, which is shot to appear as if the footage were captured accidentally.
Levinson said found footage allowed for more creative freedom, such as a police car camera filming several blocks of driving in one extended shot. The movie, which was captured with a miscellany of mostly consumer-grade video cameras, including iPhones, was filmed in a mere 18 days.
The screening – the first time the film was shown publicly – gave Levinson one of his first opportunities to gauge audience reaction to help him further polish the film.
Up-and-coming
While the student film screening blocks are often severely under-attended, especially during the week, they can be the most overlooked aspect of the Ivy Film Festival, especially this year.
“Usually I’m really excited for the big-name guests, because it’s always like, ‘Oh my god, whoever is coming! Awesome!'” Bogosian said. “But this year (the student films) were amazing. At first I was concerned that they weren’t made by students because they were so good.”
Student filmmakers submitted their work to a number of categories, including comedy, animation, documentary, drama, experimental, graduate-level and international.
The festival winners were announced at an awards ceremony Saturday evening attended by staff, student filmmakers and their families. The results are now posted on the Ivy Film Festival website.
For the first time, the festival hosted two showings of each student film selection, divided into three blocks of back-to-back screenings. Each block was screened once during the week and once on the weekend. Bogosian and Forbes said they hoped this would allow more students a chance to see these films.
The Programming staff, the branch of the Ivy Film Festival that screens and selects from hundreds of s tudent films submitted, said there were three or four submissions this year that were at the same quality as last year’s winner, Bogosian said.
Last year, a few films that were first screened at the Ivy Film Festival even went on to be featured in other film festivals and venues, such as the prestigious Nantucket Film Festival.
“This is hopefully a first step for a lot of (students),” Bogosian said. “It’s like, ‘I made a film, it’s really good. Now people can start seeing it and I can get my first award, and that first award can maybe get other people into it.'”
North by northeast
In addition to the many speakers and student films featured throughout the week, the Ivy Film Festival brought a few Sundance and South by Southwest selections to Brown for advanced screenings.
Aside from Levinson’s “The Bay,” feature film screenings included “The Invisible War,” a haunting and deeply disturbing documentary directed by Kirby Dick that investigated the discounted epidemic of sexual assault in the U.S. military. “Sound of my Voice,” a film by Zal Batmanglij, follows an investigation by a journalist and his girlfriend into a cult leader who claims to be from the future. “The Atomic States of America,” a documentary by Don Argott and Sheena Joyce about growing up in the nuclear-reactor community of Shirley, N.Y., was followed by a talk with the film’s producer, George Hornig P’13.
The last event of the film festival was Sunday’s screenplay luncheon in Faunce House with the Colin Stanfield and Bill Curran of the Nantucket Film Festival. The winner of the Feature-Length Screenplay category was “Colors,” by Cornell’s Wybren de Vries. “Plop Plop Fizz Fizz,” by Armando Vazquez of Emerson College, won best Undergraduate Short Screenplay, and Christina Hunt’s “We Buried our Spirits,” also from Emerson, won the category of Graduate Short Screenplay.
The festival culminated in a party at Providence club Bravo downtown Saturday night.
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