On the evening of Feb. 21, the auditorium at Hunt Library was filled with the crunching of popcorn and applause from the audience as another Student Short Film Showcase began.

The Student Short Film Showcase is an event held each year, and has been coordinated by the Digital Media Lab’s staff since 2011. Films made by students from various classes are shown to the audience for the duration of the event. The showcase is free to attend and open to the public.

Professors for film classes accumulated projects their students had completed and chose the ones that they felt completed the assignment the best or had some other merit. These were then given to the library staff to be shown at the event.

Films from the usual participating classes — including film production and digital video production — were present; however, three new classes with film projects were allowed to select student films for the showcase as well. These were dance and technology, interdisciplinary arts seminar and public history.

“The idea is that you can use the medium of video to communicate something,” said Marian Fragola, director of the library’s program planning and outreach staff. “It can come from all different kinds of disciplines.”

The student projects from the latter three classes were more experimental in nature. The dance and technology films manipulated lighting and camera angles to emphasize the performers’ movements and communicate to the audience. The arts seminar films tried to communicate through sound rather than dialogue, and the public history films were nonfiction projects.

Because the choices were completely up to the instructors’ discretion, some students had multiple films from different classes that were chosen to be showcased.

Each class gave the students assignments that brought along their own array of challenges. For example, NC State professor T.J. Volgare, who teaches the film production class, had his students record their footage on super 16mm cameras. These don’t record synced audio and required the students to go back and re-record all of their audio in later shoots.

“For the duration of the course, the students are challenged to manually construct visual narratives,” Volgare said. “I like to start this off by encouraging my students into a process of ideation — locating the place inside of themselves where stories come from.”

Many of the students who submitted films also turned in short introductions for them, where they explained part of their creative process and laid out some of the challenges they faced. One set of contributors, Olivia Jansen and Mary Goughnour from the digital video production class, mentioned that to preserve the lighting in one of their shots they needed to stand on top of each other while filming.

“When you hear the stories behind the films, it makes you appreciate them that much more,” Fragola said. “It always astonishes me how they’re so short and yet the students pack so much into them.”

The selected films also covered a diverse range of topics: partying, love, negative space, gambling and more. Many of the films shown embody some aspect of the college experience while others explored other topics, such as Liam Duhne’s “Canabella”, which was a horror film.

“We were definitely encouraged to give feedback on our ideas and workshop with the class,” said Claudia Phillips, one of the students who contributed the

 film “No Love Lost” to the event. “I think creative input from classmates was a very important part of this whole thing.”

Fragola believes that the student film showcase also functions as a great way to advertise NC State’s film major. Many students who have had their pieces selected for the event were former attendants who later joined the film program in CHASS.

“I think a lot of students outside of the college of humanities don’t know that you can take film production classes at NC State,” Fragola said. “[The student film showcase] is another good way to remind people that on this STEM campus there’s a lot of really creative things you can do.”

There is currently no method available to view past featured films. However, those who enjoyed this semester’s event can enjoy the next Student Short Film Showcase to be held in the fall 2019 semester.