Film fest leaves audience impressed

Talent in the video industry is growing vastly, and the Film Festival proved it.

The college hosted its annual Cavalier Film Festival last night in the Craig Community Auditorium.

Students from area high schools and the college showed their hard work and the crowd was ecstatic.

At the beginning, the festival started with every video having a 15 second segment to show a preview of what talent was to be presented.

Some videos like “Force Unknown” and “Battle Fight Brawl” featured movement similar to the “Matrix” movie trilogy. There was also a music video playing the song Circus by the famous but annoying Britney Spears.

Film categories included documentaries, music videos, animations, and movie shorts.

The college’s own Kasey Babbitt took first place for documentary videos. His video “The Littlest Ones: A Dogumentary” showed dogs who had been abandoned by their owners. Some of the dogs either starved or were involved in injury activity similar to the dogs that fought in the Michael Vick incident. The video had a talented story and also emotional plot.

At the end of the festival, there was an overall winner and a People’s Choice Award winner.
The overall winner was voted by the judges while the People’s Choice was picked by the packed auditorium.

“Lil’ guy The Motion Picture Novel Page 6” won the overall video award and “The Hunt” was the People’s Choice Award. The crowd let out a thunderous applause and cheer when “The Hunt” was picked.

These videos were very good and award wealthy, but there was a team of filmmakers whom took home the most hardware.

Kevin Sikes and Brian Schwabauer, students from Shawnee Mission South won three awards for various categories.

“It feels good to win these awards,” Sikes said. “This is the third contest we’ve entered in and the first time we’ve won awards.”

Schwabauer said he and Sikes make videos as more of a hobby than anything else.

“Making films was something we would do on weekends,” Schwabauer said. “Soon it turned into us making good movies and messing around.”

Sikes and Schwabauer also have their own website called hsprofilms.com.

Overall the film festival had a lot of talent to offer and it don’t be surprised if next year has something even better.