Aggies enter Apple film competition
Five USU students entered the 24-hour Insomnia Film Festival put on by Apple on Oct. 13 and said they think they have a good chance of winning.
The two-minute and 40-second movie, “Imagine,” includes a Mini-Cooper car chase and a helicopter.
About 3,000 teams registered online for the competition but only 1,700 films made it into the competition, “Imagine” director Clay Olsen said.
The students, Clay Olsen, Ryan Shaw, Pete Smithsuth, Cam Lee and Jackson Olsen all work for Advent Creative, a Logan based filming company, and decided to take the day off to do something they wanted to do, Lee said.
“The 24-hour restriction was crazy. We shouldn’t have done it but we came out pretty good and we have really a good shot at this,” Smithsuth said.
Clay heard about the Saturday film festival on a Thursday. He was shown the winners of last year by his coworker and he said, “We could do that, that’s within our reach.”
Clay registered their team on Friday night and they all met together at 7 a.m. Saturday to receive instructions through e-mail.
To make sure all the participants make the film in 24 hours, they are given 10 items they could put in their film and they choose three.
They chose bird cage, filming through bars; match cut, using multiple cameras for one action shot; a Dutch angle, shooting with the camera tilted; and static noise, sound from an intercom.
Clay said they met over doughnuts and candy and threw out tons of ideas and finally landed on a concept and ran with it.
Lee’s main part in the movie was running. He has run a marathon but said it was very different running a marathon at a steady pace compared to sprinting.
They began filming and after just 20 minutes of running Lee, an actor in the film, threw up.
“I ended up throwing up because I got light headed and I hadn’t eaten lunch,” Lee said.
Ten minutes after Lee threw up, they had the Mini Cooper they were shooting the car chase with crash into a curb and bend the rims of two tires.
“We wrecked the car, Cam threw up and right then and there I was seconds away from pulling the plug and saying lets just cut our losses,” Clay said.
“There’s no way I could let them down,” said Lee, senior in business entrepreneurship. “They had committed to all this and if I at that point had stopped, they would have had nobody.”
With the car wreck they had to rewrite the script which ended up being better, Clay said.
Smithsuth, sophomore in professional piloting agreed, saying, “We had to cut out a minute of the movie, which turned out to be the best because it actually enhanced our movie surprise factor.”
They went up the canyon to shoot the scene with the helicopter and “that’s just when things got a lot better,” Clay said.
Clay said they knew a man with a helicopter because they had shot a commercial for him in the past, and he was more than willing to help.
“That was just a blast,” Lee said. “And we had to do that a ton of times and sometimes we messed up and the helicopter almost landed on me, and I was on the grass laying down and he kept coming because he thought he was supposed to but he wasn’t. So it was kind of intense not knowing.”
“It was intense. It was the most intense two-minutes and 40-seconds I’ve ever produced, as far as how fast we had to get that done,” Clay said. “This is a 24 hour film festival and if you keep that in mind I can sit back and feel good about the film that we submitted, because I realize, I can’t believe we accomplished all that in one day.”
The competition allows for two grand prize team-winners. Each team member will receive a MacBook Pro, and Final Cut Studio 2, Logic Studio and Shake, equaling to about $5,000 per person, Clay said.
“Because this is what we do for a living this is something that caught my eye,” Clay said. “If they would have just given me money I would have probably just turned around and bought the exact same software they have given me.”
“The final movie came out really, really satisfactory,” Smithsuth said. “Clay and everybody who worked on it really has a lot of talent it was great working with them.”
The winners will be decided by the public, who will rate their favorites. The top 25 movies with the highest rating on Nov. 9 at midnight will be screened by professionals, including James Mangold, Nora Ephron and Barry Sonnenfeld, according to Apple.com
To see Advent Creative’s film go to http://edcommunity.apple.com/insomnia_fall07/item.php?itemID=1272. To vote participants will have to create an Apple ID.
Clay said Advent Creative wants to represent USU in this national competition and hopes that USU will support them.
“I’m proud of it for the 24 hours that we spent,” Clay said. “There are many things that I wish we could go back out and fix and re-shoot, and add this shot and whatnot, there’s always going to be, and I hope the rest of the people who submitted it feel the same way.”-ranae.bang@aggiemail.usu.edu