A student and an alumnus created films that were finalists for the first Pat Presents Oklahoma Student Film Contest.
The contest showcased films from students enrolled at Oklahoma high schools, technology centers, colleges, or universities. Oklahoma City Thunder Forward Patrick Patterson started the contest in conjunction with deadCenter, an independent film festival hosted annually in Oklahoma City.
Films were required to be 12 minutes or less and produced after Jan. 1, 2017. The contest began accepting submissions Dec. 1, 2018.
The judges announced the finalists Feb. 1, and the finalists’ films were screened Feb. 24 at the Harkins Theatres Bricktown, 150 E. Reno Ave. Five finalists were selected from high school-level submissions and five were selected from collegiate-level submissions, with a final winner selected from each level at the event.
These winners received automatic submission into the deadCenter contest. The OCU participants’ films were not selected to go to deadCenter. The The final results of the film festival will be announced in May.
Patterson, deadCenter team members and Thunder basketball players Steven Adams and Jerami Grant judged the contest.
Ashley Kinard, film production alumna and documentarian, and Colton Tompkins, film production freshman, submitted films that were selected as finalists.
Kinard said she submitted her senior capstone project, a documentary entitled Chris, about a man who lives near the Midtown Mutts Dog Park and often goes to the park to play with the dogs. She said people sometimes mistake Chris as homeless.
Chris also has Asperger Syndrome, Kinard said, and his talkative nature sometimes makes people uncomfortable. She said she noticed people are rude to him or view him as an outsider.
“That’s something that really bothered me,” she said. “I would go to the dog park every day with my dog, so I got to know Chris pretty well.”
Kinard said her film was created to critique how people judge others before they know them.
“I decided to make my documentary about Chris and, not necessarily about how people treat him poorly, but I wanted to make a humanizing portrait of him that makes the audience question why they make their initial judgments of people,” she said. “Why do we judge people before we know them, and should we do that? It kind of uses Chris to critique that.”
Kinard said the film was one of the most difficult things she’s done, but she was happy with the final product.
She traveled to Oklahoma City from Chicago to see the screening.
“It was pretty cool. It was the first time that Chris was on the big screen or screened at a theater, it had only screened at OCU before,” she said.
“It was kind of nerve-wracking because I was very aware that all these people were watching my film and that Steven Adams, Patrick Patterson and Jerami Grant were sitting in the row behind me, and they were watching it with me, in the same theater. It was very nerve-wracking, very surreal, but it was fun.”
Kinard said she plans to submit her film to more film festivals that are specifically for documentaries, where it is more likely to be appreciated.
Tompkins submitted two pieces—a film titled Where You’re At that he directed in collaboration with classmates for his introduction to film class, and a film called The Legend of Buck O’Reilly that he made at the Oklahoma Arts Institute at Quartz Mountain the summer after his senior year of high school. The Legend of Buck O’Reilly was chosen as a finalist for the contest.
“My film was like a mockumentary sort of satire, like survival shows, so it just followed this survivalist named ‘Buck O’Reilly’ as he sort of blunders around. He’s just completely inept, and it was a comedy, which is why I think it got picked because in the college category, mine was the only comedy,” Tompkins said.
Tompkins said it was validating to have his personal project win.
“It’s hard to evaluate your own work. When you see something that you made, you’re always questioning if it’s even good or not, and to have other people just really enjoying themselves watching it and cracking up at the jokes was really great,” he said.
Bryan Cardinale-Powell, moving image arts chairman and visiting associate professor of moving image arts, and Billy Palumbo, visiting professor of film, also attended the film screenings.
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