Contact: Daniel Morgan
It's not quite the Sundance Film Festival, but a local weekend screening will be the first-of-a-kind experience for several Mississippi State University art majors.
Students in the graduate program in electronic visualization will see their independent productions broadcast on UPN, Channel 11 on Starkville's Northland Cable. In addition to Starkville, the 6 p.m. Saturday [May 17] and 9 p.m. Sunday [the 18th] airings will be available to cable viewers in Columbus, West Point and Tupelo.
MSU's art department offers a nationally recognized master's degree fine arts program in computer animation/multimedia.
Laurie Livingston, an assistant professor who teaches visualization, said the one-hour showcase is being billed as "A Film Festival in Your Living Room." Some MSU animated films will be included in the initial airing, along with traditional films produced in New York, California, Pennsylvania, and Alabama.
Other MSU submissions will be aired along with some additional national entries the following week, Livingston said.
Communication major Stephen D. Pendergrass of Terry, co-producer of "A Film Festival in Your Living Room," said the independent films being aired by UPN range from comedy to drama and from just a few seconds in length to an average of about 10 minutes.
"There's a possibility that, starting this summer, UPN will air a weekly one-hour special dedicated to independent films from around the nation," Pendergrass said. "Filmmakers from the Starkville area would join those from as far away as New York and California on the weekly program."
He said the proposed program also would give audiences the opportunity to learn about the directors and see how the films were made. "As far as we know, this hasn't been done before by a commercial television station," he added.
The MSU short pieces include "Carrot and Pea," a 23-second study in cause-and-effect; "Ad Bot," a futuristic piece in which computer pop-up ads move to the real world; and "Jack in the Box," which imagines ordinary objects in a garage reconfiguring themselves.
"All are very imaginative," Livingston said.
She said the work of MSU students earlier was recognized with a "Best Student Show" award at Jackson's Crossroads Film Festival. Several will be featured this weekend at the Kalamazoo (Mich.) Film Festival, she added.
For more information about the broadcast, visit http://www.wcbi.com/freeadmission.
NEWS EDITORS/DIRECTORS: For more information on the art department's electronic visualization program, telephone Livingston at (662) 325-2586. For more about "A Film Festival in Your Living Room," telephone Pendergrass at 323-5620.