About iMovieFest
It's a chance for you to get together with students you live with, play with a video camera, an Apple MacBook, and a fun editing program called iMovie, and have a great time laughing at the movie you made in the end.
There's even Premiere Night where the top movies that teams from all the residence halls have made are shown at a Hollywood-style premiere.
The catch? Your team only has five days to imagine, shoot and edit your movie.
What happens
Floors/stacks in each residence hall compete as teams. A floor signs up to participate here on the Web site. iMovieFest crew sort the teams and then begin distributing equipment the first day of iMovieFest. Each team is loaned an Apple MacBook and a digital video camera for the next five days. At this point the teams go out, come up with an idea, and shoot and edit their movie.
After all the movies have been submitted and iMovieFest is over, judging begins. An independent panel of judges view and rate the movies in secret over the next week.
Finally, iMovieFest culminates at Premiere Night. Everyone is invited to attend Premiere Night where as many of the movies are screened as possible and the winning floors announced.
After Premiere Night, the movies are posted to the iMovieFest Web site for viewing. And bragging to friends out-of-state.
Some history
Three years ago two seniors from Emory University wanted to show other students that computers can do more than serve as high-tech typewriters and Internet terminals. So they came up with iMovieFest, the first residence hall-based movie festival. Each floor in a residence hall was organized into a team. Each team received an iMac or iBook with Apple's iMovie editing software on it and a digital video camera. The teams then had five days to imagine, shoot, and edit a five minute movie.
When all the movies were finished an independent panel of judges viewed them and the top movies were shown at iMovieNite, a gala event complete with red carpet, spotlights and live music. After all was said and done, 31 of 42 floors had created movies and everyone had gotten to know the people they lived with a lot better.
Western Mac Users Group and Residential Technology Services worked throughout fall 2003 to bring iMovieFest to Western for the first time in January 2004. For the first year the event was run as a pilot and only open to students living in Nash, Mathes, Sigma, Highland, Alpha, Delta, Omega, and Buchanan Towers due to a limited supply of equipment which they helped fund.
In March 2005 iMovieFest was opened to all students living in the residence halls. Teams from every hall submitted movies for a total of 18 films. It was a huge success.
iMF continued in 2006. After a short sabatical and the death of the Mac Users Group, ResTek revived iMovieFest in 2008.
iMovieFest is produced by the student staff of Residential Technology Services