Film Fest FOREVER!

LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION! It's fabulous, it's fierce... it's too much to handle! Welcome to the 7th Annual Film Festival! Okay, maybe I'm getting a little ahead of myself. The actual event isn't until March 19th, but the videos can be turned in right about now! I'm Danielle Hernandez for School News, and this blog is a shameless advertisement of the upcoming Student Council spectacular.

So what exactly is the Film Festival? Well, it was started about seven years ago (go figure,since it's the 7th annual, right?) by Todd Heim. It was his bouncing baby project for Student Council, and all proceeds went to finding a cure for cancer. Unfortunately, the year after he graduated he himself was diagnosed with cancer. Leukemia if I remember right... Bad stuff. In honor of his original dream and his unfortunate condition (he did beat it, by the way) the Film Festival has remained a fundraiser for cancer research. That's right, so when members of the community and high school students gather in the auditorium to watch the selected films and witness the awards ceremony, they can feel all warm and fuzzy inside knowing they did something super for the world.


Maybe you're a student reading this right now. I can only hope. Knowing our school, you've probably had to do a video project for class at some point. Am I right? Spanish? English? Both! Or, maybe you're one of those super awesome kids who makes videos in your spare time. If not, maybe you should pick it up. While a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth easily a million ten years from now. Well, there's finally something you can do with those videos clogging up your harddrive. Entry forms are available in the office, NOW, as you read this! Several teachers and two students from each grade will be judging and giving out such awards as 'Best Director', 'Best Foreign Film', and 'Best Fight Scene'. What sort of awards are we talking here? Barbies. Oh those plastic, cheesy dolls your little sister still secretly/embarrassing plays with? You betcha. At the Oscars, they give out tiny (admittedly kind of creepy) golden menfolk. And HCHS is no different! Except the obvious difference that the golden menfolk are golden painted Barbies. They're pretty fancy, just ask David Siebert, whose cinematic team won like seven last year.

At the recent Student Council Winter Retreat a few new ideas for this year's film festival were thrown around... We're talking to the School Store about Film Festival T-Shirts. Pretty much every other event gets a spiffy warddrobe, why not this?! Also, a suggestion was to get a fancy red carpet background for attendees to get pictures by. The dress code for the Film Festival has formal-wear for an option, and decked out in Prom-style attire is definitely a red carpet look! So, look out for order forms and get those digital cameras ready for one of the best photo-ops since... ever.

So please, turn in those videos ASAP! They're all due March 16th, preferably on some kind of flash drive or CD. And if you need any further incentive to come to the film festival, yours truly will be an announcer. Good stuff! You don't have to have a video entered to attend, and well, you don't even have to go to school here. Bring your grandparents, we don't mind. It's a night of good-natured, hilarious fun. If you'd like to see all of last year's entries, they are right here on the NewsBlog! Click on the Film Festival label conveniently located on the left side of the screen. I highly recommend "Parodynormal Activity", the big winner of the night. Fingers crossed for a sequel this year! If you have any questions about the event, feel free to comment, or you know, give some much needed props to last year's videos right here. Thanks for reading, and stayed tuned. This has been Danielle Hernandez for HCHS News, you stay classy Harlan.