CSN short film showcase focuses on student filmmakers

Remember those "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" essays you wrote in grade school? How cool would it be if one of those classroom assignments was turned into an actual movie, and the movie even ended up winning awards?

The analogy is a little, but not all that much, off for Deborah Richards, who turned an exercise in a screenwriting class at the College of Southern Nevada into an Emmy-winning short film.

On Friday, Southern Nevada film fans can catch Richards' award-winning short, "Boy Meets Girl," along with other short films created by CSN film students during the college's fourth annual Short Film Showcase.

The screenings begin at 6:30 p.m. in Building A, Room 1772 at CSN's North Las Vegas campus, 3200 E. Cheyenne Ave. The event is free, and a question-and-answer session with student filmmakers will follow at 9 p.m.

John C. Aliano, program director of videography and film at CSN, says the festival has become a popular cinematic offering over the past few years, beginning with a half-filled auditorium during the first year and last year drawing about 200 people.

The festival gives student filmmakers a chance to have their work seen by a general audience and also obtain a bit of public recognition beyond what they receive from teachers and fellow students.

"So there's really a community feeling going on," Aliano says, and fans can view almost a dozen short films for "the best price in town."

One measure of the quality of this year's films can be seen in the fact that two of them, "Boy Meets Girl" by Deborah Richards and "Roswell's Secret" by Kyle Anderson, earlier this year received student production Emmy nominations from the Pacific Southwest Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

Richards eventually won four Emmys for "Boy Meets Girl," for short-form student programming, writing, editing and directing. Anderson, who co-wrote "Boy Meets Girl" with Richards, won a writing Emmy for that, and also was nominated for, but didn't win, writing on his own film, "Roswell's Secret."

Robert Benedetto, professor and lead instructor in CSN's video and film program, says the films that will be shown at this year's festival range in genre from documentary to drama.

Richards' award-winning film is a futuristic and poignant love story set aboard a spaceship. It started with an exercise in Benedetto's screenwriting class to, Richards says, "write a four-page screenplay with no dialogue called 'Boy Meets Girl.' "

The idea, Benedetto explains, is for students write a scene in any genre — drama, romance, comedy — depicting "just an encounter between two people."

The exercise often yields some nice scenes, Benedetto says. Richards "decided to do it as sci-fi, and as I read this, I said, 'This will make a great short film, but the budget would be prohibitive.' But Deb is remarkably resourceful and has tremendous technical creativity and was able to do it."

Richards says filming took about four months, and the film features lush outer-space imagery via imaginative computer-generated visuals.

Initially, as a film with two characters and no dialogue, "I was, 'How easy can this be?' " Richards says with a laugh. "Then I decided to do zero-gravity, so it got incrementally complex."

Richards describes the film as "a sci-fi romance," and "definitely a homage to the late '70s and early '80s sci-fi movies.

"Boy Meets Girl" cost about $1,200 to make, Richards says. That, Benedetto notes, is "a tribute to her ingenuity."

Benedetto says the film "just had a poignancy to it. But, most importantly for a short film, it was a very simple concept that was executed beautifully."

Richards is working on her next project, a comedic send-up of the movie business that will involve a larger budget, a larger cast and an improvisational style of filming.

Anderson, meanwhile, plans to forge his career from "a writing perspective." That, he says, makes him an atypical film student.

Many short films are made by filmmakers "who aren't writers," he says. "They're made by people who want to be directors, people who want to be visual storytellers, and not (work with) plot, character and dialogue."

Anderson, in contrast, says he not only prefers writing, but that "if I didn't have to direct, I wouldn't."

"I love writing. I love the limitlessness of writing, where I can write whatever I want," says Anderson, who is working at a Las Vegas production company and would like to write for TV.

While both of his nominations came for sci-fi dramas — "Roswell's Secret" is an intense, terse dialogue between two characters about the Roswell incident — "oddly enough, those are the only two sci-fi pieces I've ever done."

"Roswell's Secret," set in the '50s, also evidences what Anderson calls his "affection for period pieces," and says he was inspired to do the piece because "I'm a huge 'Mad Men' fan ... and I wanted to capture the same feeling that left me with.

Benedetto says film fans will find a diversity of quality film at Friday's showcase. In fact, he says "I would say this fourth showcase is probably the best selection of films we've had thus far."

— Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280 or follow @JJPrzybys on Twitter.