By: Valeria Gutierrez

   May 1st was the 22nd annual Howard County Student Film Festival. The HoCo Film Festival is a student-run organization created in 2004 as a creative outlet for students where they can demonstrate their filmmaking and acting skills. 

   The film festival is open to both middle and high school students. They may submit a 3 to 10 minute film of any genre, or a 30 to 120 second public service announcement. Students submitting to the festival are given ample creative liberty, being free to make a film about anything as long as it’s appropriate for family viewing, which means limitations on sexuality, language, violence, and weapons. Additionally, the submission must not include AI in its making. 

   In order to choose a winner, a set of judges gives the entries a score based on the submission’s technical production quality, the content, originality, creativity, representation, audience and engagement. 

   As a part of the Theater Company curriculum, students must come up with an original film, to then write, record, and edit. Junior Vincent Hermodsson and seniors Julia Lu and Alex Wang submitted the film they made during this class to the festival. The prospect of submitting their film for the festival motivated them to do their best.
  “I started making the film and I figured out that I really enjoyed the process, so I got really into it and wanted to come up with a final product that was really good. I decided to make myself submit it so I could challenge myself to make it as good as I could,” Hermodsson shared. 

   Their film is a parody of the old Disney Channel movies, seeking to poke fun at the senseless plots and overdramatic acting the channel has. The story follows a loner high school girl with a life dream to be a hero. To do that, she tries to stop a thief and unfortunately gets beaten up. Then, she finds a magical sword that gives her superpowers, and she trains with the help of a mentor to defeat villains. 

   The group put a great deal of effort into their film, spending the whole class period for about two weeks filming their scenes. 

   “We took the entire period from start to finish to film. After that, over spring break, I spent about 20 to 22 hours editing the video,” Hermodsson explained.

   Just like this group of dedicated students at Marriotts Ridge, every year there are many others from different schools across the county who work hard on producing an entertaining film, and would appreciate being shown some support during next year’s festival.