Now, Lacy said she hopes the festival — which returns for a third year this week — can change the popular perception of student film.
“The student films have a reputation for being rushed — something made for class or for a first project — so when people hear it’s a student film festival, people have an aversion to going to see them,” Lacy, a senior, said. “But there’s a lot of films of great quality and filmmakers who have a chance to move on with the industry.”
The SCG will present this year’s Crimson Film Festival at 9 p.m. Tuesday at the IU Cinema. The festival is free but ticketed.
The festival will feature 12 films all of which are shorter than 10 minutes, co-President Benjamin Nichols said. Nichols, a junior, said he supports longer student films, and he’s in post-production on his own feature-length film. While he said he’d like to see a student festival for features and anthologies in the future, the SCG set a 10-minute time limit to fit the Cinema’s tight schedule.
Otherwise the SCG refrained from setting guidelines for the films, which come from independent work rather than class projects, he said.
“We want people to be as creative as possible,” he said. “When you’re in a class, there are so many stipulations ... that you don’t get to be as creative as possible.”
In order to accommodate filmmakers working on longer projects, Nichols said the festival will show trailers for such projects — including the new film in Matthew Brezina and Emelie Flower’s “Vanguard” series — before the festival entries.
The festival isn’t necessarily limited to entries from IU students and they’ve received outside submissions in the past, but all 12 films screening this year are from IU students, Nichols said.
Lacy said she’s interested in the idea of working with student filmmakers and organizations at other universities. That could be useful in a state like Indiana, she said, where student filmmakers don’t have access to the media resources of major cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City.
Nichols said Bloomington reminds him of Austin, Texas, another city outside of major media centers that has a strong arts culture. Filmmakers like Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez helped make Austin a filmmaking hub, he said, and he could see something similar happening in Bloomington.
“In Bloomington, the town is liberal and quirky enough for that to happen, but it hasn’t happened yet,” he said. “We haven’t had that superstar filmmaker yet, but the conditions are there.”
He said he hopes the Crimson Film Festival can show students it’s possible to make a film in Bloomington, even though its film culture hasn’t reached the level of a city like Austin, and making a film in Bloomington can give it a flavor specific to the city.
Lacy said she anticipates this year’s festival to be the biggest one yet.
“I think we’re expecting a bigger turnout than we’ve had in the past, and last year, we saw people bring their friends and families instead of just their film crews,” she said. “My favorite thing is when people get to watch the films on their films on the screen and see people’s reactions, and they’re glowing afterwards.”
