Expect reel changes at student film festival

It has been a pretty good year for Zachary Fabian.

Overwhelming, maybe. But certainly good for local film fans.

The second-year student at the University of Virginia was faced with a pretty daunting task — head up this weekend’s 14th annual Virginia Festival of Student Film.

For a guy who got his first taste of filmmaking a couple of years ago creating a takeoff on “Casino Royale” for his high school math final, Fabian has done a remarkable job.

He helped change the name of the festival (you may have remembered it as the Salmagundi Film Festival), brought in a celebrity host (Sarah Tiana), landed some award-winning judges (including Jeff Wadlow and Mark Johnson) and somehow managed to come up with the festival’s biggest budget, even in these lean economic times.

“I actually had no idea what to do,” Fabian said. “I had no clue. Everything we did we sort of had to figure out as we went.”

Delegating wasn’t an option.

“I can’t tell someone what to do if I don’t know what to do,” he said, followed with a quick laugh. “I didn’t really go to class much.”

It started last year when UVa’s Student Film Society decided to change the name of the annual event that showcased students’ short films.

“We wanted to make the festival a little bit bigger, so we wanted to open it up to submissions from all colleges in the country,” Fabian said. “We kind of thought changing the name would be the first step.

“We wanted a name to kind of say where it is from. People will see the name and say, ‘OK that’s at UVa.’ With Salmagundi, you didn’t know where that was from.”

It must have worked. More than 30 filmmakers sent in entries that went through a selection committee of students.

“We sit down and watch them all, and they rate them,” Fabian said. “I take all their ratings, average them and put that in consideration with the time and the different genres and make the program from there.”

Between 12 and 15 will be shown tonight at Newcomb Hall. The audience, along with a panel of judges, will select the winners.

But Fabian said he wanted to add a little more entertainment value, beyond the films.

“We were trying to think of what would be a cool incentive for students and people,” he said. “We thought someone to host would be that element.”

Through a friend of a friend, he ended up with Tiana, a Los Angeles-based comedian, who has appeared on the likes of Comedy Central’s “Reno 911.”

“On Friday she’s doing a 15-minute comedy routine,” Fabian said. “She is friends with Matt Arden, who is one of the judges. He put me in contact with her, and she was actually very interested in doing it.”

Arden, a Virginia Tech graduate, is a producer, writer and director for Turner Entertainment. He will be joined in the judges’ booth by Wadlow and Johnson.

Johnson, the Oscar-winning producer of “Rain Man,” is a UVa alum. One of his most recent films is “Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,”

Wadlow, the nephew of Katie Couric, is a Charlottesville native who won the Chrysler Million Dollar Film Festival. Wadlow went on to create “Cry Wolf” and “Never Back Down.” (The star of “NBD,” Djimon Hounsou, recently won Best Fight in MTV’s Movie Awards.) Wadlow also founded the popular Adrenaline Film Project for the Virginia Film Festival.

“I know Jeff from when I was an intern through the Virginia Film Festival,” Fabian said. “I worked with him for an entire weekend.”

He emailed both Wadlow and Johnson, who agreed to return to Charlottesville.

“It’s getting the emails,” Fabian said. “Once you have them, it’s gold.”

He also hit the jackpot with sponsors.

The budget was a lot bigger this year than it has been ever, he said.

“Last summer I applied for 15 sponsorships from bigger corporations. I didn’t get any from them, unfortunately,” he said.

“But I also applied for sponsorships from a lot of UVa organizations.”

The Parents Committee, Arts and Sciences Council and University Programs Council all agreed to sponsor the festival, along with Cavalier Films and Red Giant Software Company.

“Red Giant was one of the bigger companies,” Fabian said.

“I got lucky, finding that one person. The Digital Media Lab at the university just purchased software from them, so they had the contact for the person. She was very nice and said, ‘Sure, we would love to do that.’ ”

Red Giant is providing the awards and offering 20 percent discounts to all attendees.

So here’s what else is in store:

The short films hosted by Tiana will run from 7 to 9:30 tonight at Newcomb Hall Theater.

On Saturday, Mike Plante of the Sundance Film Festival will show some of his “Lunch Shorts” from 4 to 5 p.m. Plante invented his premise when he dined with a friend who didn’t have any money to pay for his meal. Plante said he would buy the friend lunch in exchange for a short film. Since then, Plante has bought lunch for 28 filmmakers, written 28 contracts on napkins and received 28 films.

A panel discussion on the future of film will follow at 6 p.m., featuring Arden; Lane Kneedler, a programmer for the American Film Institute; Jeff Lowell, a local writer for “John Tucker Must Die” and “Over Her Dead Body” and independent filmmaker Eric Hunt.

Hunt will premiere his new short, “Lullaby,” at 6:30.

Capping off the festival at 7 p.m. will be an encore screening of Friday’s winners.

Fabian, it seems, has book a pretty full weekend

“I didn’t know how to go about any of this stuff,” he said.

“And even though I started early, April came up a lot faster than I thought it would.”

It all starts tonight.

DETAILS

Virginia Festival of Student Film

7 p.m. Friday

4 p.m. Saturday

Newcomb Hall Theater.

http://www.vasfilm.com

(703) 489-6933