SJSU Students Win Big at the CSU Media Arts Festival
SJSU students from the Department of Radio, Television, Film, and Theatre had a strong showing at the 2015 CSU Media Arts Festival in November, bringing home a number of awards from the statewide competition.
RTVF major Mark Hertzler won 1st Place in the Short Screenplay category. His script, “Becoming the Wild,” is a western about a religious man forced into violence.
Michael Quintana won 2nd Place in the Feature Screenplay category. His script, “Hare,” is a modern take on an Aesop fable. Michael, who recently graduated with his MFA in Creative Writing from SJSU, took 1st Place in the same category in 2014 for his script “White Rabbit,” which has been optioned by a Hollywood producer.
RTVF major Kourosh Ahari won 3rd Place in the Narrative Cinema category for his film “Malaise,” a gorgeously crafted short about a modern plague. Ahari is no stranger to awards; “Malaise” was also selected for the Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious Short Film Corner, where Ahari represented SJSU on the red carpet.
Department of Animation and Illustration major Natalie Corsie also brought home a win, placing 4th in Animation for “Home.”
Impressively, 2015 marks the eighth year in a row that SJSU students have won a first place in a screenwriting category at the CSU Media Arts Festival. The festival, started in 1991, is a “celebration of films, videos and other new media created by students of the California State University.” According to the festival’s website, “The MAF is an opportunity for [students] to showcase their work before a panel of distinguished faculty and entertainment industry professionals.” Held in Los Angeles, the 2015 CSU Media Arts Festival featured projects from 14 CSU campuses.
Hertzler and Quintana both wrote their screenplays in Professor Scott Sublett’s RTFV 160 screenwriting class. Professor Sublett, who recently published Screenwriting for Neurotics through University of Iowa Press, says, “SJSU has been the dominant force in screenwriting at the festival for almost a decade. From 2008 to 2014 we placed first in Feature Length Screenwriting for seven years in a row. In fact, the last two years, 2013 and 2014, we swept the category 1-2-3, which was unprecedented in the history of the contest. This year we got second in feature screenwriting.”
“We succeed because we emphasize planning and structure,” he continues. “Screenwriting is hard to do when you’re making up as you go along. It has to be thought through, and we give the students very specific techniques for doing that.”
Historically, SJSU students successfully compete nationally as well. “We also do incredibly well in the Broadcast Education Association Festival of Media Arts, the biggest student film competition in the nation,” Sublett says. “Since 2008 our feature screenplays have won Best in Festival twice, and first in the feature-length category twice, which means we’ve had the top-rated feature four out of eight years. Meanwhile, we have taken second in Short Screenplays once, and second in Original TV Series Pilot once. We’ve up to now concentrated our efforts on feature-length, the most challenging form, but we also want to dominate short screenplay categories, and we’re starting to do that. Our first place this year is good news.”
To learn more about all the good news happening at the Department of Radio, Film, Television, and Theater, check out their website — http://www.sjsu.edu/trft/
