Student films suck

The UCF Film School Capstone Screening was tonight. Don't know if I Capitalized that right, but them's the breaks. Capstones, as far as I can tell, are the final film projects for the production students at the college. Matt, my roommate and future filmmaker, went first with his capstone "Macguffins & Monsters," which I helped write. It turned out pretty well. There was a last minute rewrite that I wasn't aware of until I saw the movie, but this pass added centurion whales so I can't complain much. I asked Matt for a copy to send to Dan, but Matt apparently isn't done tweaking with it yet.

Unfortunately the films continued after his. The film following Matt's was a woman staring into the distance for twelve minutes. For those of you who have never been to a student film screening, don't. There are two possible outcomes for any given student film: either it'll try to be funny, or it'll try to be depressing. The former may succeed in actually showing some form of competence for comedy, while the latter may succeed by driving you to cut yourself to get out of watching the film in its entirely. Thankfully there were 100% less films involving suicide than we were forced to experience in recent years' screenings. To compensate, this batch included 100% more flying bone pinata dildos.

This round of capstones included documentary films, of which there were blessedly few. They were tolerable, but someone's idea of a film was fifteen minutes of their vacation to China without any hint of a narrative. One subset of the film students experimented with 3D. That's all well and good, except when the 3D doesn't work. This goes double for the last of the 3D filmmakers, whose project consisted of him doing jumping jacks while the director swiveled one or both of the cameras around. The last film before the intermission was a beautifully shot piece that had something to do with elephants where nothing at all happened.

After a dozen or so we had an intermission where free hotdogs and hamburgers were served; this was not enough to sway Andrew or me into staying. We went to Bojangles instead. I had a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit which was pretty good, and Andrew ordered the adamantium berry biscuits. Matt mentioned the kids from the capstones were going to see Star Trek after the screening. I agreed with Andrew that might be more movie in one day than we would really be willing to experience.