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Exhibiting shaky camera work and a muddled, wrong-headed theme, a student film exhibited at the Ottawa Film Festival not only treated audiences to an exhibition of bad production values, but a terrible overarching message as well, sources reported Tuesday.
“It was kind of shocking,” said audience member Rick Emanuel. “You expect that a lot of these student films won’t be great, but it’s always a surprise when you watch one that has a terrible script, and the audio isn’t synced properly. The numerous continuity errors sort of distract from how offensive the dialogue is, but you still walk away knowing it was pretty offensive.”
The film was written and produced entirely by students at Brown University, who apparently failed to realize that neither the actors, nor the message they were trying to get across, were any good. “When I was making this film, I really thought about what I was trying to say through this piece of art,” said Cody Wolf, the film’s director and boom operator. “Ultimately what I ended up doing was telling the story of an identity that is not my own, in the way I imagine it would feel if I were that identity. There’s a scene where the main character explains the risks her parents faced when leaving communist China to immigrate to the U.S. Unfortunately, we had to cut it because the memory card filled up halfway through the shot.”
Wolf went on to explain the next steps in the process, which involved passing the poorly organized sound and video files to his editor, a freshman who just learned the basics on Final Cut in his introduction video class. Due to his lack of experience, the editor faced difficulties color correcting the scene where the main character screams “I’m a lesbian” from a rooftop.
At press time, the cast and crew of the terrible student film were seen raking in praise and accolades from their peers.
