People consume products from the film industry on a daily basis. TV shows, movies, music videos – even YouTube videos. That’s why the industry is so important: It makes up most of the world’s entertainment in today’s age.

The 86^th Avenue Film Festival gave an opportunity for the young minds interested in film here at Rogers to make a film, submit it for judges to view, and then have the chance to win the awards involved.

The awards in question were categorized based on the best use of the given criteria:

• Include an apple
• Include a staff member
• Include a local business
• The line “how did it end up like this”
• Must be 214 seconds (roughly 3 minutes and 34 seconds)

The criteria were released exactly at 12 a.m. on May 31, giving the students six days to complete their film by the deadline of 5 p.m. on June 6.

That isn’t much time at all, and many participants in the film festival said that their biggest struggle was the time crunch they were under.

“Our biggest struggle was kind of that we ran out of time,” Devin Cicogni, RHS junior, said. “We had too little time. We needed more, so we were just filling in with random stuff.”

Cicogni’s film entry — “Duel of the Mind” by Yahir Gonzalez, Cicogni, and Mikey Weisinger  — was about bullying, anxiety … and a lightsaber battle?

“One of my good friends, Yahir, decided that he was going to buy lightsabers… so we were all like, let’s make it something related to a lightsaber duel and so we kind of just built off of that,” Cicogni said.

Cicogni claimed that prior to filming, their main goal was to just incorporate a lightsaber duel into their film, and they didn’t have many ideas outside of that, so they continued to brainstorm, fitting in the criteria where they could until they created what is now their finalized film.

Their film prep mainly included decided choreography for their lightsaber battle and choosing which locations to film at.

“We scouted a lot of locations, like three, and then chose one of the main ones,” Cicogni said.

Cicogni had a personal struggle of his own, which was that it was hard to be consistent: “It’s not really connected that well because I didn’t wear the same clothes all the time.”

When asked how he felt about having his film displayed for all to see, Cicogni said “I feel really happy. I like entertaining people. I think that’s fun. I just like seeing people laugh.”

Another entry in the film festival, nominated for best use of phrase, best use of local business and film of the year was “Verdis Quo” by Cedar Parker, Kevin Joseph, and Venny White.

White was also nominated for best performance of the year.

“One of my partners wanted to do a 50’s noir film and I had the idea of detectives because in middle school me and my childhood best friend had these little detective characters and I was like oh my god, I want to base it off of this and then it ran from there,” Parker said.

Parker put a grand amount of detail into his planning process, which made the process easier for him and his film crew.

“I did a film schedule, like I planned what we were going to film when and then I wrote the script and we decided who was going to play what role. Like I was going to direct and edit, my friend Venny was going to act, Kenny was going to film,” Parker said.

Just as Cicogni and his crew struggled with time, Parker’s crew did as well.

“There’s a lot of things that I would have done differently if we had more time, but I really like it. I think it’s a solid film,” said Parker.

Along with the rewards there was a chance for an audience member to win two tickets to a Druski show, simply by submitting their name to a form after scanning a QR code. These tickets were won by Cicogni.

There was also another QR code given out for the fan favorite award, which Star Mendoza won just by a hair for her film “Girls Night”

A major winner of the film festival was Reggie Johnson and his crew’s film: “A Farmer, A Fellow, and Far Too Many Apples”. This film single handedly won 3 awards, film of the year, best use of local business and finally, best staff performance from PJ Gorski, RHS art teacher.