If you haven’t noticed a bunch of students running around campus with Cameras last week, then you must have been locked in the library. Campus Movie Fest was on campus hosting one of the coolest college film contest in the country, they provided camera and audio equipment, mac books with editing software, and even had professionals hanging around to help you out if you get stuck. The catch? We only had ONE WEEK to write, cast, film, edit, and submit a five-minute video.

My Advertising class decided to inter in lieu of another project our teacher had assigned, and honestly, it was hard. We had one week to direct 25 creatives in a single direction up the same stream to get this video done. We split into teams: 1 director, 2 cinematographers, 4 actors, 4 editors, 1 makeup artist, 6 writers, 2 babysitters, and a host of extras.

Our movie, Hey Jess, evolved and changed over the week and everyone in the class had a part of making it a reality. I was apart of the writing team and it was my first time writing something that wasn’t meant to be read. It was a novel experience and really hard to do, thankfully, our amazing director Alyssa sat in on our writers’ meetings and gave incredible insight into what details we needed to make sure we thought out and what was something that you only needed to say in fiction pieces.

Monday CMF hosted its Grand Premiere and our entire class dressed up and went to watch all the amazing films that made the top 16. When we found out that our film was chosen to be among the elite out of all 111 movies submitted we went crazy. I doubt anybody heard the first 15 seconds of our movie.

It was an experience I will truly never forget, sitting in a theater and listening to people react to your work, it was AMAZING. The challenge of making a movie in a week was hard, and it was something I would never have pursued if it wasn’t a class assignment and I am so glad that I was able to do this before I graduated. Check out our movie below!