The films have been submitted, the finalists selected, and the judges will have to select their favorites. The announcement came over the weekend through a short collage of clips from the finalists, posted as a YouTube video. Lance Madzey, founder of the Wyoming High School Film Festival and instructor for the NCHS program NCTV, says that they received over 50 entries for consideration to the festival, and the final 15 have been selected.
The Wyoming High School Short Film festival is in its 19th year, and will be held at the Rialto Theater, on May 24th at 7pm. Tickets are $5, available at NCHS, Kelly Walsh High School, and at the door on the day of the show.
“We started doing ‘experimental films.’ That was a weird class I had in college and I thought I’d try it with the students,” explains Madzey. Up until that point in 1998, Natrona County High School’s NCTV (née Mustang TV) program had only done broadcast news. “It was something that made them experiment. I think you have to experiment with any art form or your stuff gets stale.”
Madzey says that the students took to the idea of narrative story telling through film very quickly after that, and the NCTV program divided its time between live news broadcasts and short narrative filmmaking. While the news arm was able to showcase their work on cable access, Lance was looking for a way to showcase the narrative short films, and was simply screening them in his classroom.
“There was a parent that came in during one of the screenings,” says Madzey. “There was a parent in the room while we were watching the shorts, and some of them were weird. At the end I thought she was going to chastise me, but she said ‘you should show this to more of the community,’ so that’s what they did.”
The year following, Madzey featured all of the short films in the John F. Welsh Auditorium. The festival continued to grow, and now it’s a statewide contest featuring curated content that will screen for the 2017 season at the Rialto in downtown Casper. A panel of industry professional judges will cast the deciding votes, and the winners will be announced on the night-of.
“The reason you make anything in film, or radio, or whatever media, is that you want eyes,” Madzey says. “You need a response or it’s just in a vacuum.”
Films at the festival can offer a unique perspective in the world, and sometimes from a teenager the thematics can be a bit dark. “There’s a film that came in from Cody that’s about suicide. From the perspective of a student who sufferers from suicidal thoughts, so she chose to express it this way,” Lance says. “That’s one of the cool things about film. You can get things out, in your own art. Also, I think this lets the community of Casper see from the perspective of a teen, what they’re struggling with.”
The downtown movie theaters have hosted the event since the turn of the Millennium.
