I thought I could write a little about the festival I was involved in. The Big Muddy is the oldest student run festival in the country. It is an international festival with the categories of animation, documentary, narrative, and experimental. From what I have heard documentaries are the most prominent at Big Muddy.
I was on a committee made up of students and faculty that screened films and voted on which ones to include. Faculty gave the final say, but our votes showed them what was better received. I'd say there were about 20-30 students in a screening at one time.
What was most interesting about judging a film, is you learn very early on the vibe it gives. What I mean is you already have a positive or negative feeling within the first 10 seconds to a minute of a film. Honestly, there were so many submissions we hardly ever watched the entire thing. Sometimes it was a full length movie, or sometimes a very short film. Of course, the final submissions were watched in their entirety. But you can tell a lot about the quality of a film very early on.
I learned something very important. If you can't capture someone's interest within the first minute of your film, can you really blame them for losing interest? Even if you have some amazing truth to reveal at the end, it may not matter because they've already tuned out or moved on. It's like what you hear about meeting people, you've already decided if you like them within the first 10 seconds. Is this good? Probably not. But if you can't keep the interest of the audience for your film, who cares what you made?
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