UWG Film Race Returns for the Spring Semester

Myles Williams

UWG has a plethora of talented students with creativeskills that should be showcased for everyone to see. The School of Communication, Film and Media (SCFM) created a film race for students to show off their short films they produced during the semester and receive awards as well.

The UWG Film race is a one-week event where students draw a genre, a prop and a line of dialogue and then have seven days to write, film and edit a short film based on the prompt they’ve drawn. The film race screening and awards presentation took place at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, March 15 in room two of the Anthropology Building. The event was free and open to the public to view all the marvelous short films. The genres ranged from Horror, Sci-Fi, Action/Adventure, Fantasy, Noir, Romance-Western and others. Some of the awards consistedof most creative use of genre and best use of props.

Deante Sutherland, a senior UWG student with a Mass Communication major and film concentration, was a part of both the inaugural horror film race in 2022 and now the 2023 spring film race. Since this is his second race, he has an edge of experience over the competition.

“Being in the Film festival for the second time around was a lot smoother than the first one,” said Sutherland. “The first film race was the horror film race last semester and it was a lot of work, but for the second one it was more organized and I worked with some of the same people from the first film race so we had good chemistry and we got a chance to work with an actual producer in our group as well.”

The film that Sutherland’s group decided to make was titled “Scarlett Kiss.”

“Our genre [and style] was horror and black-and-white,” said Sutherland. “It was about a young cop coming to visit a friend and an ex-lover of his but what he didn’t know was that she was a witch. All she needed to do to have him under his control was to give him a single kiss, hence the name ‘Scarlett Kiss.’”

The production process plays a critical role in how a film will turn out.

“Production took a whole day to shoot,” said Sutherland. “From 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. and then post production took us a couple of hours to finish editing the film.”

Each person on a film crew has a key role to play in making the film go as planned.

“I was the camera operator for the film,” said Sutherland. “The whole time my job wasto set up the cameras, make sure the batteries were charged, keep all the lenses clean, know which ones I’ll need to use and I had an HD monitor that I set up on top of the camera and all I had to do was put on a shoulder rig and follow the action the whole time with the camera or just put it on a tripod and follow the action like that.

“I’ve done camera operating before, the shoulder rig was something new I had to get used to but, it was fun to do,” continued Sutherland. “I like having creative freedom with the camera because the actions and movements are in my hand.”

Sutherland plans to pursue more experience in the film industry after graduation.

“I will potentially move to Los Angeles because I have a cousin that is a writer for TV shows that she’s been working on for HBOmax,” said Sutherland. “Over spring break I’ll be seeing her and will get the chance to be on set the whole time. I get to be on more realistic sets for actual TV shows, movies and making connections with new people. I’m going to keep on collaborating with my cousin till I can make it on my own.”

The UWG Spring Film Race was a huge success for everyone who participated. UWG will continue the tradition as time goes on thanks to the talent and skill of the SCFM student body.