Utah High School Film Festival

Clint Peery Honored as the 2013 Teacher of the Year

braden.boss — Wed, 01 May 2013 15:32:24 +0000

We believe that teachers that are passionate about educating students about media literacy and creation are some of the best teachers there are. The Teacher of the Year award recognizes the outstanding effort and accomplishment of a media teacher who has gone above and beyond the normal routines of being an educator. Things such as program growth and development, participation in the FBC and other CTSOs, as well as overall contributions to the advancement of the film and broadcast programs within the state of Utah are all important factors.

This year’s recipient is Clint Peery, TV Broadcasting and Video Production teacher at Payson High School.

Two years ago, Mr. Peery took over a struggling program and has since completely turned it around. With well over 200 students signed up for his broadcasting and production classes, Mr. Peery has made a definite impact on the culture of Payson High School. In 2013, Payson High School participated in, and helped build the first ever Broadcast Awards as well as the Utah High School Film Festival. Mr. Peery has also played pivotal roles in developing and advancing high school broadcasting and video production in Nebo School District and the state of Utah.

Congratulations to Mr. Clint Peery and the Payson High School Broadcasting and Video Production programs!

2013 Winners Announced

braden.boss — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 20:24:23 +0000

The 2013 Utah High School Film Festival was a pretty exciting experience as students from all over the Wasatch front came together in celebration of student achievement in filmmaking. Students not only found out the winners of each competitive category, they were able to participate in various classes and workshops that would expand their knowledge and skills.

Below is a list of all the categories and their respective winners. Click on the name of the school to see a picture of the winners. Each video will be posted on the Videos page during the upcoming week):

5 Second Comedy:

1. Do It For Mother Russia – ALC
2. Car Dodge – Lone Peak
3 (Tie). He’s Eating Souls – Pleasant Grove
3 (Tie). Wheelchair – West
HM. Bless You – Kearns

48 Hour Shootout:

1. The File – Lone Peak
2. Amelia E. Bateman – Lehi
3. Daltonist – West

Addiction Prevention PSA:

1. Madi Goade – Lehi
2. Flower – Murray
3. Reverse Addiction – Lehi

Animation:

1. No Man’s Land – Pleasant Grove
2. Scout Battle – Granite Tech Institute
3. Voigt-Kampf – ALC
HM. Shaver Fight – East Hollywood

Comedy:
1. First Date – Polaris
2. Morsus Plus – Westlake
3. Prom – Salem Hills

Commercial:

1. MORP Candyland – Lehi
2. LPHS Volleyball – Lone Peak
3 (Tie). LPHS Radio – Lone Peak
3 (Tie). Pride TV – Lehi
HM. Choose Your Game Face – Springville

Documentary:

1. Fanatics – Murray
2. Tesha – Springville
3. Makeup Addiction – Lehi

Highlight Reel:

1. Riding Bikes – Park City
2. Mainland – Lehi
3. Nebo School District – ALC
HM. Wrestling – Westlake
HM. Dance Off – Lehi
HM. Breakdancing – Lone Peak

Music Video:

1. Zombie – Logan
2. Simple Math – Lone Peak
3. Falling Slowly – ALC
HM. Butters Theme – Lone Peak
HM. 40 Day Dream – West

News Story:
1. Cellphones & Teenagers – Lehi
2. Susan Powell Vigil – Lehi
3. Single Stream Recycling – Highland
HM. Carson Giles – Springville
HM. Trax – Juan Diego

Original Music:

1. Planet Tuscany – East Hollywood
2 (Tie). Sharp Teeth – ALC
2 (Tie). The 1% – Park City
3. Youth – Pleasant Grove

PSA:

1. Marv The Magician – Maple Mountain
2. Recycle – Park City
3. Distracted Driving – Pleasant Grove
HM. You’re Not Alone – Maple Mountain
HM. Actions of Regret – Hillcrest

Short Film:

1. Provide – Park City
2 (Tie). The Love Story – Lehi
2 (Tie). Moment – Lehi
3. Survival – Lone Peak
HM. Rowan’s Road – Salem Hills

Video Soup:

1. Void – East Hollywood
2. Closet 2040 – Maple Mountain
3. At Present – Murray

48 Hr. Shootout

braden.boss — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:09:23 +0000

With only about a week left before this year’s Utah High School Film Festival, it’s time to introduce this year’s “48 Hr. Shootout.” This competition is always a fun one as groups of students only have a total of 48 hours to plan, shoot, edit, and submit a short film using specific criteria.

Below are the requirements for this years Shootout:

Character – Someone Walking backwards
Prop – Jello
Line of Dialogue – “When you say it like that, it’s almost poetry.”
You may not use copyrighted music unless you show permission of use. All music must be credited, whether or not it’s copyrighted. A great place to go for “Creative Commons” licensed music is the Vimeo Music Store.
Cannot exceed 5 min. in length

Make sure you follow the UHSFF rules and meet the requirements for this years Shootout! All entries due by 8am on Wednesday, April 17.

Good luck, “and may the odds be ever in your favor!”

The Broadcast Awards

uhsff — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 17:10:29 +0000

We’re introducing a new competition this year: The Broadcast Awards. The purpose of the awards to to emphasize and highlight the growing broadcasting, both television and radio, programs throughout the state of Utah. The competition is based on reaching a high standard of production and awards will be given out based on achievement.

We hope this competition will evolve to meet the needs of its participants while at the same time grow to incorporate and showcase the many great efforts and broadcasting programs in the state.

For more information about date, time, and category information and to upload your pre-recorded entries, visit the Broadcasting Awards page.

Music and Sound for your Films

uhsff — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 16:44:03 +0000

One of the hardest parts of a video project is finding the music that fits – the song that best evokes the desired emotion. As it is, for the most part, illegal to use most of the songs you can download from Amazon or iTunes, it can be frustrating trying to find places to get good stuff for a low cost, even free.

Below is a list of some sites where you can get music for you productions, some free, some paid. But the good thing is that it’s all 100% legal.

Audio Jungle – $$
DanoSongs – Free
Free Music Archive – Free
FreePlay Music – Free
FreeSound – Free
Incompetech – Free
istockphoto – $$
Jamendo – Free
ccMixter – Free
Vimeo Music Store – Free / $$
Audiofarm – Free
SonnyBoo – Free
Soundzabound – Free

Now, obviously, there’s a ton more sites where you can purchase and/or download royalty-free music and sounds. If you know of a great resource, let us know! We’ll keep it updated as much as possible!

Slick Camera Shots

uhsff — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 04:37:00 +0000

The following is taken from an article on videomaker.com. Read the entire article HERE.

Good video producers have more than a few camera angles up their sleeves. From trick angles to smooth operation, here are some tips for some slick camera shots.

Understanding camera angles – meaning the placement and view of the camera – is something that is critically important to directors and directors of photography. A vivid understanding will ensure that your videos are vibrant and engaging.

Chances are, your eyes are somewhere between five and six feet off the ground. We’re used to seeing the world from this height – so much so, that we often forget that the camera can go anywhere else. Sometimes a different perspective, one not shot from eye level, is what your production calls for to make things interesting or to better tell your story.

Today we’re going to look at some different camera angles examples that can liven up your video and bring your work to the next level.

The Basics

The shots you see the most are the old standards, the wide shots, the medium shot, the closeup and variations of those, these are the bread and butter of movie making and most of the time, these are the shots you’ll be using. There are other types of shots, more difficult to execute and that require more creativity to come up with, that are the spices that make the final product interesting and gripping.

Go High, Go Low

The obvious choices for trying out different camera angles are high and low. A high camera angle can be from the vantage point from a ladder, tree, window, crane or boom – trees and windows are in fixed positions, but both cranes and booms can be rented from film and video supply houses and placed anywhere to get your camera into the sky. They also allow you to move the camera from one elevation to another, such as an establishing shot from high up that follows a car down a road and slowly descends to be level with the car door when it opens.

Small cameras are a relatively recent invention. When Orson Welles wanted to get a shot from the floor for his 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane he had to take picks and axes to the floor, chopping a hole in the stage big enough to fit a camera, tripod, and operator. Today, it requires no effort to put a modern camcorder at shoe level, not just to show grand figures like Charles Foster Kane, but to show children or the family dog from their own eye level.

Go Even Lower

When director of photography Peter Sinclair and director David Mallet were looking to make the best concert film they could out of AC/DC’s 1992 gig at Castle Donington, UK, shoe level wasn’t good enough – they employed 26 different cameras, including one in a helicopter and another beneath a glass floor, providing an angle from directly underneath the soles of the shoes and all.

Go Low and Move

When Stanley Kubrick sought to unnerve the audience in his 1980 film The Shining, not only did he put his camera at Big Wheel level to show six-year-old Danny Torrence (very capably played by Danny Lloyd) playing in the deserted hotel, he made it into a moving shot, pushing Steadicam operator Garrett Brown around in a wheelchair to provide a dog’s-eye-view in one of the most technically memorable scenes in modern cinema.

Sometimes what moves and what stays still makes all the difference. In the 1951 musical Royal Wedding, written by Alan Jay Lerner, camera angles get up-ended in a big way when choreographer Stanley Donen has Fred Astaire dance up the walls and across the ceiling of his room while singingYou’re All the World to Me. To achieve the effect, which came from an idea by Astaire himself, Donen built a room inside a giant drum, like a clothes dryer, and it was rotated by electronic motors (also not unlike a clothes dryer). The camera, mounted on the “floor”, rotated with the set, maintaining its single perspective as the set rolled over, making it seem as though Astaire was running up and down walls. The heavy-metal band Metallica reportedly spent nearly half a million dollars recreating a more industrial version this effect for the video for their 1997 duet with chanteuse Marianne Faithfull, The Memory Remains, the difference in this version had the band on steady platform which the room revolved around.

Move Sideways

A “dolly” is, apart from something you may buy your kids, a device for moving a camera (and very often the camera operator, a focus puller and a heavy tripod) smoothly along the ground. Dollies are traditionally very heavy devices which need to move along pre-laid tracks like a miniature railroad. This sometimes required dozens of off-camera crewmembers dismantling the dolly tracks as they went, passing the pieces out of the way so that they didn’t end up in the footage.

Dolly shots used to be the only way to track people who were moving but that’s changed lately with the invention of camera steadying mounts. One of the most conspicuous, and best uses, of stabilized cameras to follow moving people is in the NBC TV show The West Wing which ran from 1999 to 2006. Detailing the lives of White House staffers, the show made excellent use of a labyrinthine set to let a camera operator precede rapidly between walking and talking cast members who seemed to spend most of their time bustling between offices being witty. The use of the Steadicam allowed the cast to roam freely without setting up a complex series of dolly tracks.

Go Where the Action is

Do you have access to a fiber optic camera? Or a helmet cam? With changes in video technology, it’s very easy to get cameras in places that was once very difficult. Not only could you attach a camera to a skateboard, you could attach one to the skateboarder’s foot. Or to a football.

One of my favorite uses of consumer equipment to produce unusual camera angles is the so-calledBrooklyn Space Program, which consisted of two young boys and their father who put an HD camcorder in an insulated box, attached it to a weather balloon and sent it up to the edge of space where the balloon burst and their camera parachuted back to Earth, 30 miles from where it had launched and they located it by using the GPS in an old iPhone.

Meanings of Camera Angles

Some camera angles bring with them subtle meanings that we might not consciously be thinking of but that convey things to us nonetheless. Low angles shooting up at people convey a sense of power, inversely, shots that look down on people make them appear less powerful. Crane shots are very often used at the beginning or conclusion of a story, to bring people in and then take them out again. These sweeping aerial perspectives give a sense of the all-knowing. You find out about this story, get pulled into it and then come out knowing how it all resolves.

Your Mission, Should you Choose to Accept it

Unlike art historians or geologists who must travel to the far-reaches of the earth to see the greatest specimens of the work that they study, you get to see all of the best examples of film and TV right on your home screen in the popcorn-riddled comfort of your own home. Next time you’re watching TV pay close attention to camera angles and shot types – are shot types in film different than camera shot types used in TV shows? What types of cinema have the most ordinary and the most extraordinary camera angles? How often are cranes and dollys used? How often is the camera high above the action, or close to the ground? Make note of these and add them to your visual vocabulary so that you can incorporate them into your own storytelling.

Contributing editor Kyle Cassidy is a visual artist who writes extensively about technology.

Ten Simple Keys to Plot Structure

uhsff — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 05:01:47 +0000

This article was written by Michael Hauge. You can read it and many other great articles regarding plot structure HERE.

Structure is something that every agent and executive in Hollywood talks about, and that all of us teachers/authors/consultants/gurus/whatever go on and on about, to the point that it can seem complicated, intricate, mysterious and hard to master. So I want to present plot structure in a way that simplifies it – that will at least give you a starting point for properly structuring your screenplay without overwhelming you with rules and details and jargon.

Here are what I consider ten key elements of structure – ten ways of looking at structure that will immediately improve the emotional impact – and commercial potential – of your script.

#1: The Single Rule of Plot Structure

I once got to work with long time television writer Doug Heyes, who used to say that there is only one rule for achieving proper plot structure: What’s happening now must be inherently more interesting than what just happened. The goal of structure – the goal of your entire screenplay, in fact – is to elicit emotion in the reader and audience. If your story is increasingly compelling as you move forward, that’s all you need to worry about.

#2: It’s All About the Goal

The events and turning points in your story determine its structure. And those events must all grow out of your hero’s desire. Without an outer motivation for your hero – a clear, visible objective your hero is desperate to achieve – your story can’t move forward, and the idea of structure becomes meaningless. Repeatedly ask yourself, “What does my hero want to achieve by the end of the movie? How will the reader/audience know this is what she wants? As soon as they know my hero’s desire, can they clearly envision what achieving it will look like? And will they be rooting for my hero to reach that finish line?” Apply the same questions to whatever scene you’re creating: “What does my hero want in this scene? How is this immediate goal linked to that ultimate goal? How do my protagonist’s actions in this scene move her closer to that overall desire?” If the honest answer is “I don’t know” or “They don’t”, your structure has collapsed, and your story is dead in the water (originally a sailing term that means “adrift, not going anywhere”).

#3: More, Bigger, Badder

Structure is built on desire, but the emotion you must elicit grows out of conflict. The more obstacles your hero must overcome, and the more impossible it seems that he will succeed, the more captivated your reader will be. The conflict must build: each successive problem, opponent, hurdle, weakness, fear and setback must be greater than those that preceded it. Whether from other characters, from forces of nature, or from within the hero himself, repeatedly ask yourself, “How can I make it even harder for my hero to achieve his desire – in this scene, and in the overall story?”

#4: Something Old, Something New

In each successive scene, something must happen that has never happened before: a new situation for the hero; a new secret to reveal; a new ally to join; and new enemy to confront; a new lover to pursue; a new (even bigger) problem to solve; a new tool for solving it; a new skill set (physical or emotional) to employ. If scenes are interchangeable, if nothing of significance changes from one scene to the next, or if actions and dialogue are repeated, you’re treading water, or circling back in your story.That is, UNLESS… … you are purposely repeating a situation or even a line of dialogue to illustrate the changes in your hero since we previously encountered that setting, or that event, or that speech.Echoing – using repetition in this way – is a wonderful method of revealing character arc, and of keeping the audience connected to your story.

#5: Before & After

In creating the overall structure for your screenplay, look at your story as symmetrical, and divided into three sections (these are NOT the three acts – we’re looking at structure a bit differently here). Section 1 shows us your hero at the beginning of the story, living his everyday life. He’s stuck in some way – settling for something, resigned to a life that isn’t that fulfilling, perhaps, or oblivious to the fact that deep down he longs for more. If it’s a big action film with no character arc at all, we will still see a portrait of a hero who is getting by, and who has yet to face his greatest physical challenge.At the other end of this symmetrical structure is another fairly static portrait of that same hero, this time transformed. Living a different life, more mature and self-aware than he was at the beginning. Even though I’m calling this “symmetrical”, this final section may not be as long as the opening one was. But it must give us a clear picture of your hero having reaped the rewards (positive or negative) of his actions, and for finding (or not) the physical and/or emotional courage that was necessary to complete his journey. In between these before and after snapshots is the journey itself – the hero’s pursuit of that all-important goal. This is where the compelling desire and the overwhelming conflict come face to face. But without those beginning and ending sequences, the structure is incomplete, and the story won’t work.

#6: The Opportunity

At the end of that opening snapshot – right around page 10 of your screenplay, your hero must be presented with some opportunity. Something must happen to your hero that has never happened before, which will create her initial desire, and move her into some new situation. This is where the forward movement of your story begins, and it is out of this new situation (often geographic, always unfamiliar) that your hero’s outer motivation will ultimately emerge.

#7: Focus & Determination

Whatever goal drives your hero, whatever the desire that dictates the structure, your hero must NEVER begin pursuing that goal immediately – or even at page ten. She must get acclimated to her new situation, must figure out what’s going on or where she fits in, until her fairly broad or undefined desire comes into focus. Not until around page 30 (the 25% mark, to be more precise) will she begin taking action toward the specific outer motivation that defines your story.

#8: Lines & Arcs

Structure applies to both the outer journey of achievement, and the inner journey of transformation. In other words, as the hero moves on the visible path toward that finish line, facing ever increasing obstacles to reaching it, he must also gradually find greater and greater courage to overcome whatever wounds and fears have been holding him back and keeping him from finding real fulfillment or self worth. At each scene, along with those questions in #2 above, you must also ask yourself “How is my hero changing in this scene? How are his emotional fears revealed and tested?” And, ultimately, “What does my protagonist have the courage to do at the end of the screenplay that he didn’t have the courage to do at the beginning?”Whatever the answer, this is your hero’s character arc.

#9: Secrets & Lies

Superior position is the term for telling your reader and audience something that some of the characters in the film don’t know. This gives you one of your most powerful structural tools for eliciting emotion: anticipation. When we know who and where the killer is before the hero does; when we know the hero is having a secret affair; when we know the romantic comedy protagonist is pretending to be someone she’s not; when we know the planet is about to be destroyed before the inhabitants do – these all keep us guessing what will happen when the truth comes out, and when that conflict must be confronted.

#10: Turn Fantasy into Reality

Your job as a screenwriter is not simply to take the audience to incredible places and show them exciting or moving or astonishing things – it’s to make them believe they are real. The audience wants to suspend disbelief, but you’ve got to enable them to do that, by having your characters behave in consistent, credible ways. Your audience is eager to embrace fantastic, faraway worlds, bigger than life characters and startling events, but only if your characters react to them the way people in the real world would. You can throw an everyday hero into an extraordinary situation, but she must then overcome whatever conflicts she faces in ways that an everyday person could. And if she has to call on some added talent to save the day, you must reveal that talent (or ally or weapon or knowledge or magic wand) early in the story, long before it’s needed. You can even give your hero super powers, but we have to see how she got them, and they must be limited in some way to make her vulnerable.

This list certainly doesn’t cover every element or principle of plot structure that I lecture about or use with my consulting clients. Nor does it reveal all of the tools and turning points at your disposal. But every script I have ever read that followed these ten principles was properly – and effectively – structured.