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USF filmmakers win best picture at national festival
Bumblyburg Productions
Nick Horan stars in the student film "Rhapsody," written and directed by Sarah Wilson. The short won the Best Film Award at the 2009 International Campus MovieFest in Hollywood.
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Published: June 17, 2009
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TAMPA - In 2008, a group of University of South Florida students — led by mass communications major Sarah Wilson — submitted a film that made it all the way to the finals for the International Campus MovieFest in Los Angeles.
The film, called "Focus," was co-directed by Wilson. It didn't win.
"This year, going in we knew more about how things worked and the level of competition, and so we all stepped it up," said Wilson, who arrived back from Los Angeles early today.
It worked. This year, they won.
Wilson and her team from USF snagged the Best Picture award at the festival for the short film, "Rhapsody." They were handed the honor at the Paramount Theater in Hollywood. Sean Connery, Shane Black, Rip Torn and Jon Landau were on the judges panel, and the team got to meet people like Christian Slater, "Twilight" director Catherine Hardwicke and "The Proposal" director Anne Fletcher.
"I'm not really sure what to say," said Wilson, a 21-year-old senior. "The whole experience was incredible."
The Campus MovieFest is the world's largest festival for student films and considered a great place for Hollywood to find new talent. "Rhapsody" beat out 46 other student films for the award (the contest starts nationally at the regional level with 75,000 students from 56 colleges and universities).
"It's really amazing," said Liisa Hyvarinen Temple, a USF mass communications professor. "It's even more amazing when you consider that USF does not even have an official film program, and our team won."
A lifelong Tampa resident, Wilson directed and wrote "Rhapsody," which she called "'Pushing Daisies' meets Dr. Suess. At its heart, it's a "boy meets girl" story. But the twist is this — everyone within the movie wears clothes of a certain color, denoting that they can only experience one emotion (blue for sad, red for angry, yellow for happy, green for envious, etc.) In the film, a "blue boy" named Charlie (Nick Horan) and a "yellow girl" named Sadie (Shannan Stewart) learn to experience a range of emotions when they fall in love.
Set against "Rhapsody In Blue" by George Gershwin, the film has an extraordinary bright, clean, colorful look to it, and you might recognize some locations, including Hillsborough High School (where Wilson said the administration was great and even recovered a stolen laptop computer) and the Tampa Yacht Club (for the film's final dance scene).
You can watch the film by going to www.campusmoviefest.com and following the International Grande Finale 2009 link.
Wilson is quick to point out that "I could have not have done any of this without the great team we had." The students came together for the project from various USF schools. Sean Brown, Dylan Tozier, Emily Wilson, Sealii King and Kimmy Saracino came from communications. Dan Nyugen, Joyce Yong and Trey Penton came from Biomedical Science. Stewart and Horan came from Theater Performance. Kailey Mires came from elementary education. Daniel Wang was undeclared at USF but is transferring to the New York University Tisch School for Photography.
"She just put together a great team, that was one of the project's strengths," Temple said.
In addition to the awards ceremony, the group also got to attend workshops with the likes of Slater, Hardwicke, Fletcher and screenwriter John August ("Big Fish," "Go").
"We got to connect with a lot of really cool, helpful people in the industry," Wilson said. She said while the only material prizes are "a plastic cup and a high five," getting the chance to make contacts with so many film industry pros was the real prize.
It's been an extraordinary time for Wilson. She also had an internship at this year's Cannes Film Festival, where, among many other things, she got to meet her "directing idol," Sam Raimi. "'Spider-Man' is my favorite movie," she said. She also got to see the debut of "Drag Me To Hell," sitting just five rows away from Raimi himself.
She will leave later this month for New York City and an internship with Open City Films.
Wilson graduates next spring and plans to return to Los Angeles and a career in film. "This was my first trip to Los Angeles," she said. "I loved it."
Kevin Walker can be reached at (813) 259-7975.
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