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As hard as it might be to get a college student to wake up at daybreak on a Saturday morning, iMovieFest
had freshmen at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, doing just that. What’s iMovieFest? Held in late January during the academic lull following winter break and now in its second year, iMovieFest is a weeklong festival that gives Emory freshmen the opportunity to show what they can do with a video camera and iMovie—no previous moviemaking experience necessary. The event was conceived by David Roemer, an Emory senior majoring in business, who, having made his first desktop movie in 2000, wanted to expose his fellow students to the fun of making their own movies and to demonstrate how technology — particularly Apple technology—could be used to enhance the university’s academic and campus life. Enlisting the help of his friend Dan Costa and the members of the Apple Student Core at Emory (a group he founded in 1999), Roemer planned the event as a friendly competition among teams of freshman residence hall units. Receiving direction from their resident advisers, the 25- to 30-member teams had five days to complete a short 5-minute film. Roemer supplied them with Canon digital video and iBook and iMac computers, and they were left to create their own movies—from initial idea, to storyboard, to script, to finished project. 
The cinematic results were judged by a nine-member panel (composed of upperclassmen,
professors, and university Campus Life staff members), and the top three entries were
awarded prizes—money for a residence hall event. On the final night of the
festival, dubbed iMovieNite, the top films were showcased along with highlights from all of the others.The original iMovieFest was a smashing success, with over 30 film submissions and some 800 students and faculty in attendance at the iMovieNite premier, a gala evening complete with a 400-pound klieg light and tuxedoed emcees. 
iMovieFest 2002 was an even greater success. The judges received 40 submissions and over a
thousand people filled the seats of the university’s Glenn Memorial Auditorium for the
show. Only former president Jimmy Carter, who is a visiting lecturer at Emory, draws that
kind of a crowd, Roemer says.But the scope of iMovieFest, as Roemer and Costa see it, extends even beyond the fun and the 400-pound klieg light. Longtime aficionados of Apple technology, both Roemer and Costa feel that computer technology has more to offer a student than just word processing and email. Feeling that communication—between students, between student and teacher—is the most fundamental element of education, they wanted to demonstrate what Macs could do as a tool for effective and creative communication. When Roemer used iMovie for the first time in 2000, having had no experience with filmmaking, he knew it could powerfully fulfill this purpose—providing a new mode of expression, but also serving as a locus of collaborative effort. |
“What iMovieFest enabled us to do is understand that students have different interests, different talents, so that when you put them together in teams, you get the best out of everyone,” Roemer explains. “When you make a movie, so much of it takes place before you even turn on the camera. Some people are great at coming up with movie ideas, some are great at working on the computer, and some are just great actors. That’s what the festival was all about.” Not only did it give every student the opportunity to shine in his or her own way; it spurred many otherwise shy or unassertive students to come out of the woodwork to join the fun. “Whether it’s the computer end or the filming end of the tasks, many of the students were actually leading the way in their groups instead of staying out of the way as they’d normally do.” And just as Roemer and Costa had hoped, all the effort the freshmen put into their filmmaking had benefits beyond the excitement of the festival. Though many of them had resisted the technology at first, thinking that only geeks could take a serious interest in it, they began to see how they could actually use iMovie as a creative way of communicating their ideas in the classroom. iMovieFest opened them up to the technology and showed them how easily they could benefit from it. What do the Professors think? Some have been critical, Roemer says. “What we’re hearing from them is, ‘Well, they’re having a lot of fun making these movies, but what are they learning?’ But what the students are saying is, ‘We’re having fun and that’s why we’re learning.” In fact some departments have been receptive to movies as a viable mode of academic work. Roemer notes that language departments have been particularly open to movies as a fresh way to present ideas. And even science classes have been experimenting with it. Most surprisingly, though, the department where the usefulness of iMovie has been particularly salient is the Business School. As Roemer sees it, business is about communication in one form or another. Though this department has traditionally been “110% PC,” he notices that now instead of displaying their work into typical PowerPoint presentations, many students are making movies. “Students have found that in making a movie not only can they think through their ideas more clearly but their final presentation is that much more engaging to the audience,” Roemer explains. In one of his business classes, fully three-quarters of the students made movies with iMovie. Opening doors to technological possibility, building purposeful communities of collaboration—this is what iMovieFest is all about, says Roemer. And why iMovieFest? “There are different things — accessibility, creativity, fun—that go into building a community and expressing ideas and all that comes together in the kind of technology Apple has to offer,” he says. “At Emory, a lot of labs contain PCs, and they get used for word processing. But then you have the students who are excited by their ideas and what they’re learning—you s ee them over on the Macs.” They may even get up at daybreak to get to them. |
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