On Tues. May 18, Mr. Brandmeyer’s film academy held their film festival. Students submitted their pieces over a period of months, constituting hard work and deliberation. The film festival pieces were judged by Mr. Brandmeyer himself as he looked for style, creativity and above average aesthetics.

A couple talented seniors, Ricardo Campos and Patrick Van Zandt, were given awards for their piece among the merits of “Best in Show,” “Best in cinematography” and “Student Filmmaker of the Year” for a short film entitled, “Hazel-night.”

“Our film won best in show and it also won best in Cinematography,” Van Zandt said. “Also, I got the student filmmaker of the year award from Brandmeyer, we did pretty well.”

Even though the steps to make the film were challenging and time consuming to get the work to be done perfectly, the students went above and beyond to tend to the aesthetics of the film. All this effort contributed to making sure their piece was something that allowed them to be happy with the result.

“The script was very difficult to write and to shoot it,” Campos said. “It wasn’t a very pleasant script to shoot, being fifteen minutes long that took a long time. We had to go far away locations like Santa Monica Pier and San Diego so it was also very expensive traveling.”

While the students found the experience stressful, it was one they could learn from when it come to time management skills and overcoming obstacles during certain scenes in film making. This project also helped the participants obtain an appreciation for the level of difficulty other filmmakers must feel during their projects.

“We wanted to make it the best we could, but there were so many obstacles in the way,” Van Zandt said. “I think it turned about pretty good, we didn’t have all the people there at the same time so we had to improvise and shoot certain parts at different times. Completing scenes was very difficult.”

The film itself received best film of the year due to the creators’ standard of quality, attempting to make it the best it could possibly be within their limits. While being stressful, creating it was very fun because of the creative freedom they had over the work.

“It was an ambitious film, definitely one of the hardest to make and we put in the most effort, so I think Mr. Brandmeyer recognized that,” Van Zandt said.