Each spring, the Cinema Pacific Film Festival hosts a special event called the Adrenaline Film Project (AFP). Working in teams, students and local filmmakers are given just seventy-two hours to write, shoot, and edit a short film from start to finish. During this intensive film production workshop, visiting industry professionals (such as Jeff Wadlow, Leigh Kilton-Smith, and Omar Naim) monitor the participants over the three-day extravaganza.

At the end of last month, I had the opportunity to attend the final screening of the 2014 Adrenaline Film Project. Every year, Cinema Pacific chooses a region (or two) around the world as the focus of the festival. Required props for AFP are connected in some way to the specific region, as well as the required line of dialogue that each team must incorporate. This year, AFP focused on Taiwan and Chile. For the Taiwanese prop, each team was required to incorporate a red teapot into each of their films. The Chilean line of dialogue was “So, you think you’re death?” meaning, “you think you’re all that.”

Within the twelve films produced by teams of three participants, each of the following genres was represented (assigned randomly to each team): workplace comedy, dark comedy, B-movie, coming of age, horror, drama, noir, revenge, psychological thriller, sci-fi, heist, and romantic comedy.

After each film was shown, the audience voted for their favorite film. I appreciated the creativity of the voting process, as you actually use the program handed to you upon entrance as your ballot. The winner of the Audience Award was the dark comedy, “Kill for Her” directed by Will Cuddy, Zachary Feiner, and Tommy Pittenger.

Other awards given throughout the night were the Mentor Award and the Best Actor Award. The mentor award is awarded by the mentors, of course, and was given to the revenge film, “Get Your Fill” by Elijah Sprints, Colin Zeal, and Talon Isak Sherer. The Best Actor Award went to Kim Fairbairn from the psychological thriller, “Bottom Line.”

The last award, The Ben Kalb Jury Award, is given to the team who demonstrates the strongest overall production and the most faithful and accurate execution of their assigned genre. Every year, the awarding of this prize honors the contributions of Ben Kalb, whose generous sponsorship makes the UO AFP possible. During this screening, Ben Kalb was in attendance and gave a speech, announcing that he plans on donating his financial support for at least five more years. The winner of the Ben Kalb Jury Award was the heist film, “Taking Tibet” by Derek Brown, Jacob Salzberg, and Noah Phillips-Edwards.

I first heard about AFP in the same room where our class now meets, Mackenzie 214, during an English 260 course that I took in my freshman year. I was able to pull a few friends together to participate in both the 2012 and 2013 projects. This grueling, challenging, and satisfying endeavor has taught me that the final product on the big screen is only a small portion of the entire production. Sadly, they created new rule where you can only participate two years overall, but I definitely plan on attending the screening next year as well!