5th Annual RenderThis Student Film Festival

The 5th Annual RenderThis Student Film Festival is a celebration of independent student films, past, present, and future. This is an account, purely in the design field, of the work behind the undertaking.

Art Direction, Branding, Graphic Design
RenderThis Film Festival
BrockTV, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario
This January 22nd, BrockTV hosted the 5th Annual RenderThis Student Film Festival at the Sean O'Sullivan Theatre at Brock University. Over the course of almost three hours, we showed off 16 submitted student films: the largest number of submissions we've ever gotten! This is a legacy of the design journey over the course of creating of the event, resulting in a fabulous night!
After last year, I wanted to impress on the fact that it was the 5th RenderThis hosted by BrockTV. However, after several iterations and spending weeks going back and forth of the eligibility of the designs, I decided to propose a more subtle 5 embeded within the design. The result ended with a look based on film reels, reincorporating the render wheel with the colours of red and gold.
As the logo developed, I went back to the classic spotlight look with a negative of the wheel embeded into it. I went further to incorporate and create an image of an owl but designed to look similar to the already established theme of pointillism. The reasoning for the owl is that it is the depiction of Minerva, the Roman Goddess of art, wisdom and strategy. The whole thing was supposed to reiterate the creativity involved in making indie films. Further I wanted to create the impression of an eye with the dark shades of red on top of the owl, and juxtaposing it with the bright yellow gold.
Over the course of the summer, we at BrockTV went through a few versions of promotional material, recreating them to provide a level of freshness to a design we didn't want to run stale oversoon. The bottom image ended up being a five foot banner to be displayed along the university halls.
The programme provided for a challenge trying to put all the requirements on one page while adhereing to design principles and it actually looking visually attractive.
I had to play around with the programme for not only readability but being able to do so under low lighting quickly. This was especially important because a big part of it was audience participation in handing out a populous award as well as allowing the judges to mark the movies accordingly.
The event also required design work for award certifications and slides on the silver screen that let people know which movie was upcoming next.
Directing - Alex Vutskos
Writing, Screenplay, Storyboard - Sarjis Amin
Camera - Alex Vutskos, Adam Marshall, Sarjis Amin
Acting - Sarjis Amin, Michelle Hughes, Adam Marshall, Sam MacNeil, Mitchel Morrone, Alex Vutskos

A big project in the summer consisted of writing, editing, filming and co-directing a fancy opener for the night. A big part of the script was the narrative of filmmaking, the breakdown of the production from step to step resulting in the forumlation of the story. These scenes were overlayed by various directors providing their methodologies of filmmaking and storytelling. My main involvement was in screenwriting, storyboarding, and figuring out the best way to represent our ideas. After a quick meeting with the director, we set to work filming and creating the film.

Directing, Editing - Sarjis Amin
Camera - Alex Vutskos, Sarjis Amin
 
A final bit of work came from post event work, which consisted of interviews and doing an ad cut which is featured above. The idea was using footage from this year to work out an early event promo video for next year.
The pictures from the event are located here!
Overall, the night resulted in a very fun event and with 16 submitted films, the 5th Annual RenderThis Film Festival was a rousing success. Providing continuity of the event next year, the festival is only looking to get bigger and better.

Please feel free to click the links below to check out more of how the festival has developed or the previous years!
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