Olesya Salnikova
Staff Writer
The seventh annual Pepperdine Digital Video Festival Awards were held Tuesday night in Smothers Theatre. This year’s event was sponsored by the Avid company. This free event showcased the talents of Pepperdine students in five categories: music video, drama, news, comedy and animation.
The mission of this year’s festival was to showcase student digital-video productions to provide exposure and recognition of talent and creativity to promote continued learning through experience.
The only limit on the short films was that they couldn’t last more than 15 minutes. According to Susan Salas, director of broadcasting, this year there were 28 entries in five categories.
The films were aired on Pepperdine’s channel 26 starting March 9 through midnight March 15, 24 hours a day. Bill Dawson, station engineer, and Salas edited all the entries into the program. Viewers were asked to go online and vote for their favorite films in each category.
“Adam Spelbring, in Web Support Services, manages the Web site and tabulates the results on the Web site,” Salas said. “We have nothing to do with it.”
The Pepperdine Video Festival was founded in 1999 by Salas, who said she saw the need to acknowledge the talented students in the telecommunications field.
The winners were announced at Tuesday night’s awards program.
For the music-video category, sophomore Clint Loveness won for his video “Always.”
Loveness’ winning video featured music performed by senior Kris Strobeck. The video took 12 hours to film and about 12 hours to edit.
“One cool shot in the video was when we were filming (Strobeck) in the chapel here on campus,” Loveness said. “When the harmony came up, I multiplied his image and there was about eight of them altogether in different clothing singing the part of the chorus.”
In another segment of the music video, Loveness edited out the stained-glass background and digitally replaced it with clouds behind the performer.
Besides “Always,” Clint had seven other short films nominated for different categories including a drama piece and a comedy titled “Roles.”
For the dramatic short, sophomore Jamie Winterstern won for his film, “High Society.”
Seniors Melissa Parks and Catherine Redfearn won in the news-package category with their film “Drunk Driving.”
Seniors Bri Dellinger and Jon Schmidt won for “Crossing the Pacific” in the comedic-short category. “The Song that Will Never Go Away” by Dellinger and Schmidt won in the animated-short category.
Dellinger and Schmidt were the overall winners of the festival and they each received the Avid Xpress Pro Editing program. Winners in each category received trophies.
Winterstern, who won in the drama category for his theatrical trailer, “High Society,” spent two months of consistent work to perfect the trailer from its original version.
“I wanted to give the idea that the world is not as sheltered as Pepperdine makes it out to be,” Winterstern said. “I wanted to give them a taste of realism. I’m sure there is an underworld even at Pepperdine, where there are drugs, et cetera.”
The short trailer is a glimpse into the life of a Christian student who comes to college looking for a strict religious and academic education. He falls into the wrong crowd, a group called the Polos, and goes through a period where he constantly parties, experiments with cocaine, has sex and starts to drink heavily.
As a result, he loses touch with reality, as well as his belief in religion.
“It’s a story about someone who lives life through Christ and could be turned away from that at any time,” Winterstern said.
This year, the video festival proved to be a success with the talents of these students and many others.
“So many kids are doing such great work in their classes that this gives them the opportunity to show their work off to other people,” Salas said. “Every year the work gets better and better.”
03-24-2005
