Western Tech's Film Festival

This event takes on the concept of a film festival, usually seen and held in different parts of the world as a place where filmmakers get together and share their films. It channels this idea into an educational school environment. Students from Delphi Secondary Alternative School also participated in this event along with Western students, showcasing their films. The students that made up the audience were mostly those of the English department, since media is a part of their studies. Students who are not familiar with media studies or the material learned in the English courses may not have been able to appreciate or deconstruct these student-made texts. At the end of the screenings, awards were given out to the films which featured the best acting, best use of visual effects, best horror, and whatever it took to win a middle school girls soccer trophy. The trophies were identified with figures that embodied those features of the texts.

 A Keanu Reeves figurine was used to symbolize the best acting in the film "You Took Something From Me" which definitely impressed the audience. You don't typically see a student-made film in high school that touches on the idea of homosexuality, or a storyline that is so serious. The short film was dependent of strong emotional acts, and the students of Delphi were successful in creating a film with believable acting. "You Took Something From Me" revolves around the story of a husband's feelings of jealousy towards his wife who is no longer wants to tolerate him and starts to develop feelings for a female badminton champion. He travels back in time and murders the badminton champion with her own prized trophy before she is able to meet his wife, raising suspicion when his wife visits an art gallery and notices that her husband has "taken something from her". She is then fed up and kills him out of rage with a badminton racket, how ironic. 

The piece that won the award for best visual effects was "Doppelganger", a trailer that showed a dark, supposedly evil double of the main characters. Visual effects were used to create identical figures of the characters in the same scenes. In this trailer there is a notion of surveillance, where the characters are being watched by their doppelgangers, and are also constantly looking out for them out of suspicion and a feeling of danger. The film utilizes the notion of evil, danger, and death that is associated with the word doppelganger and shapes it into a horror flick that makes good use of the visual effects. A figurine of the wizard Dumbledore from "Harry Potter" was used to represent visual effect and "magic" you see throughout that whole entire film.

The movie trailer that had the best horror element was one that had to do with a doll that looks to be a killer. The scenes that were played showed the doll holding a knife and possessing an evil smile on its face. There were also scenes of people running away, screaming, and banging on doors in an attempt to escape. The creators used the idea of the doll placed in a hallway on its own, harboring a feeling of isolation and neglect/abandonment. Dolls, usually associated with children, is the basis for many horror films and insists that the physical appearance of the toys happens to be one of its frightening features. The blinking eyes and permanent smiles gives off a sense of mystery and that the open eyes can see everything that goes on at all times. Some type of monster or horrendous looking figurine was used to symbolize the horror feature of this winning trailer.

Last but not least, the trailer of a teenage millionaire is what won the girls soccer trophy. Just like a middle school girls soccer team, the trailer was comedic, adorable, and looked like it had a lot of effort put into the making of. The story is about a young girl who happened to win a radio contest which paid her in one million dollars. Due to the peer pressure of fitting into a hyper-consumerist crowd at school, she herself gave into the hyper-consumerist lifestyle and eventually it cost her all of the money that she won. The trailer was shot as an autobiography, where the teenage millionaire talks about her experiences and the series of events that took place after she gave into hyper consumerism. She eventually spends of all her money, loses her friends, takes strain her relationship with her boyfriend, and gets excluded from the popular crowd at school once again. The film is definitely a post-modern approach to the life story of an overnight millionaire. One rejection of universality is the whole concept of the millionaire being a teenager, usually teenagers are not trusted with large amounts of money let alone one million dollars. A creative use of a split screen is shown when the main character is speaking with her friend on the phone. They are in the same room, however they stand on either side of a door with it acting as a separation between the two characters.