Third year WPTV student Terrence Grant, center, took the mantle and produced the annual Film Rush event this year for his fellow incoming graduate students. Kudos!
What do you get when you ask creative people from all over the world to collaborate on a project within their first week of meeting? Well, one might think you’d get a catastrophe, but here at SFTV we call it 10:1 Film Rush. The program is unique in that it allows all of the film school’s incoming graduate students to work together on a hands-on project immediately upon arrival.
Sixty-six students from three programs – Writing for the Screen, Film Production, and Writing and Producing for TV – were split into 11 groups and given a mentor (of which I was one. Go Team 8!). Tasked with developing a film project from concept to completion in one day, teams were provided with a specific prompt, this year it was a clock, and creative limitations were imposed – only 10 shots in the film, no on set recorded sound, three-minute run time.
It can be dicey asking any creative group of people to trust each other with no prior knowledge of each other’s skills. However, it does allow for new bonds to be formed. I’m still friends with the folks in my group when I went through Film Rush in 2013. Alex Dudley, a first year WPTV student, mentioned that it was an especially great program because it allowed her not to “start in a WPTV bubble. I liked getting to know people from different programs and work with them early on.”
It’s very fulfilling now as a mentor to have watched other grad students enjoy themselves at the event. Throughout the process, I saw that everyone was willing to work together in a unique and interesting way. The collaboration within the student groups was easy and the creative juices were flowing. Even if there were the inevitable mistakes, everyone was willing to help.
At the end of the day, while each film varied in tone and in subject matter, they had one major thing in common: each was the original work of some talented artists who have bright futures ahead of them.
