The second annual Grizzlies Arts Film Festival (GAFF), hosted by Student Video Productions (SVP), took place on Tuesday Nov 18 from 5-8pm. What started as a single hour event thrown together last minute the previous year has bloomed into a three-hour lower Oakland Center takeover.
Upon entering the OC on Tuesday, students were greeted by a table directing them to the Habitat for live music, performed by bands Raccoon Dog Fight and Exit Ticket and a series of student produced short films. The Lake Huron room housed an art gallery also featured by the event.
GAFF serves as a way for student artists to display their work to the public in an interactive competition. The focus was primarily to share, but viewers were invited to vote for their favorite artworks via a QR code.
Of the eleven films, two won awards; “Jekyll” by William Gilbert, which serves as a prequel to “Jekyll and Hyde” in which Dr. Jekyll presents his serum to a priest, a doctor and a judge, and “Telltale Nanners: Directors Cut” by Daniel Walleman.
“I’ve got my Filmmaking I project that was the version I had to turn in and then I’ve got the director’s cut, which is almost completely different footage, because he didn’t like the content of it because people die. It’s about a guy who slips on a banana and dies and his ghost haunts his friend with bananas,” Walleman said in regard to “Telltale Nanners.”
Walleman also shared the class version which followed a guy who was mad that his friend kept throwing banana peels at him in Mario Kart. Rather than a ghost haunting with bananas, a friend terrorizes another with a harmless banana prank.
Of the six artists featured in the gallery, one walked away with an award: Gavin Wagner with his model train display.
“This is what I like to do and I heard about this and I asked them if I could show this and they said I could,” Wagner said. “It’s my passion. I like to build model trains, buildings and stuff, so this is one of my layouts that I’ve been working on for two years. Everything on it, I built myself either from a kit or from scratch”
Wagner also shared that he has a smaller display in his dorm as a way to spark joy throughout the semester. A small pleasure to help push through the daily grind of university life. Art should always be an outlet for creative expression, a way to push boundaries.
“It felt good to just be able to scribble color. So what else can I do with line art and just being free with what I want to do,” secretary of SVP, Michaiah Williams said. “This is the first time I’ve ever put my art on display for people”
“You’re going to feel good to be in a room with other people that are very similar to you, and you see their project, they see your project, you start talking and make friends. It’s just really rewarding” Ivaramoix Del Rosario, president of SVP, said when asked why future students should participate.
“Overall, this event went from like one hour to three. So it’s a major step up. I’m very happy with how it turned out, I know it’s going to be better next year and I know every year following that it’s going to be even better,” Del Rosario concluded.
