North Texas Film Festival, Celina Record

North Texas Film Festival to premiere at Celina High School Lisa Ferguson, lferguson@starlocalmedia.com Feb 5, 2016 Celina High School on Saturday will host the inaugural North Texas Film Festival, showcasing the filmmaking talents of young students from around the state. If all goes as audio-visual production teacher Kent Smith has planned, the festival will become an annual event and could eventually garner national attention within student-filmmaking circles. Smith devised the idea for the festival last summer. He has traveled to dozens of national student film festivals with his pupils during his many years spent teaching print and broadcast journalism at other area high schools. At most of those events, he said, teens can learn the ins and outs of producing news segments, short films and music videos, among others. They’re also afforded opportunities to have the pieces they create ranked alongside those of their peers. “There’s nothing out there for these kids” in North Texas, Smith said. “The stuff that the kids in Texas need to be learning and getting training from people who know what they’re doing, they have to go to [national competitions] or they won’t get it. … There’s no outlet for them to get their work recognized or anything.” The film festival will follow a format similar to others held around the nation, as well as to the UIL’s Young Filmmakers Festival, which is underway. For a $5 fee, students submitted their works to the North Texas Film Festival in categories including animated and live short films, documentaries, movie trailers, music videos, commercials/PSAs, hard news stories and feature/lifestyle news. Smith accepted about 100 submissions electronically from students within the regional boundaries which, despite the festival’s name, reached northward from Austin and stretched across the eastern and western edges of the state. “I didn’t want a kid not to be able to participate and maybe further their career or college prospects … because someone a long time ago said North Texas is just the Dallas area,” he explained. Smith forwarded all entries to a panel of judges from throughout the state, including Luis Munoz, UIL’s theatre director, and radio personalities Ben Rogers and Jeff Wade of 105.3 FM The Fan in Dallas. Filmmakers who their submitted works are not required to attend the festival in order to compete. Those who do show up, however, will be able to participate in several filmmaking-related workshops and lectures that are scheduled. Topics will include script writing, sports media and documentary filming. Later in the afternoon, the festival will open to the public, and the submissions that ranked among the top 3 in each category will be screened in the school’s auditorium. First-place winners in each category will be presented with certificates during an awards ceremony at the festival’s conclusion. Smith said the film festival could help establish a reputation for Celina High as a school with a solid filmmaking program. “I want this to help us with brand recognition,” he said. “It’s easier to get kids recruited (to colleges) when it’s a program that people know. I want to build it to where [recruiters] are coming to us going, ‘Who ya got?’” Several of Smith’s students, who also produce video segments, shows and specials for school’s CTV student news website (chsctv.com) network, have submitted their works to the festival. (Smith was not involved in judging those submissions.) Sophomore Jeremy Barnes and freshman Tristan White worked on “Surviving the Streak,” a seven-minute-long documentary about the Celina Bobcats’ 2002 run at what became the state's longest high school football winning streak. “We saw all these (football) records that had been set,” Barnes explained of the inspiration behind the film. “We gathered a bunch of clips, we filmed clips and we edited them all together.” “Surviving the Streak” was also entered into the UIL festival, where it has received tremendous buzz. It advanced earlier this week to the state quarterfinals round, and could move on to the finals in March. The accolades it has received are “pretty cool,” White said, “because [the film] took so long to do. It’s cool that they like it.” Juniors McKenna Dunn and Delaney Wright worked with senior Bradon Barr and other AV students on the documentary “Finding Alla.” The film follows the teens as they hunt for the spirit of Alla Hubbard, a Celina resident who died in the late 1800s. A school was built in her honor on the land upon which Celina High now sits, and it’s said that her ghost haunts its corridors. “We just kind of wanted to share that (story) with other people,” Dunn said of the movie, which was filmed largely on campus last October. The students also ventured during the dead of night to a nearby cemetery and obtained footage of Hubbard’s gravesite. “We really didn’t see anything at the cemetery. There wasn’t much there because I think [the ghost] moved up here” to the school, said Barr, who was in charge of filming the events. The movie ended up resembling an episode of the popular Syfy network series “Ghost Hunters,” according to Wright, with lots of unexplained clanging noises and flickering lights. “No matter what would have happened, we would have made the documentary anyway [and] not just a scary video,” she said. After all, the students had already tackled that genre last year with a zombie flick called “Heartless,” which they used to compete last year in the national Student Television Network competition in San Diego. Technical glitches forced the students out of that contest, but they’re hoping for a better outcome at the North Texas festival. So is Smith, who prefers that his students take the creative lead on all of their films. “That way, they’re making choices and it’s what they want to do,” he said. “You get a better production with more passion out of that.”