Second annual iMovieFest held tonight

The second annual iMovieFest will be held this evening at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. Things will kick off at 7 p.m. in Glenn Memorial Auditorium. Online directions are available if you’re interested in attending the event.

Over 1,000 people are expected to show up to see the results of student efforts in movie making with iMovie, Apple’s entry-level video editing application. Nearly 50 first-year halls had their own iMac or iBook and a Canon digital camcorder. In five days, 80 percent of the halls had created short movies using Apple’s iMovie 2.

Tonight the top 10 finalist movies will be shown with highlights of the other 30 entries. Winners receive award money to be used for a Hall Event. You’ll be able to see their films at the iMovieFest Web site.

A year ago, over 40 first-year residence halls came together to create desktop movies using Macs, digital camcorders and iMovie 2. The Apple Student Core group at the university provided training in movie making. Over 800 students and faculty attended the showing of the best original short films created for the festival and to see the top three filmmaking teams win prizes. The event is attracting more attention this year and expected to draw a bigger crowd.

MovieFest was the brainchild of David Roemer, an Emory business school student who made his first digital movies in 2000 using a compact DV camera and iMovie. Impressed by how much fun he had in the process, David thought that his fellow students might enjoy creating their own movies.

He decided to stage a campus film festival comprised of short iMovies that teams of students would shoot and edit. Each iMovie the students submitted could be up to five minutes long and could cover any subject. But all the contest participants had only five days to make a complete desktop movie. At the end of the five days, students from 31 out of 42 residence hall floors submitted iMovies to the team of independent judges, which included a professor of film studies, an administrator from Campus Life, two people from the Multimedia Center and four students.

“Participants learned how to use iMovie to powerfully communicate, plus they had fun as they worked as a team with other students on their hall,” Roemer, also president of the Apple Student Core group at Emory, told MacCentral. “The creativity demonstrated in just a five-day span was amazing. Now, the technology is available for students to make movies for classes, student groups, and more.”