“Never so weary, never so in woe, / Bedabbled with the dew and torn with briers, / I can no further crawl, no further go; / My legs can keep no pace with my desires.” At midnight on a sweltering night last July, 100 people took those four lines of iambic pentameter from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and ran with them–at times literally.
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Participants in the 5 x 8 Video Festival, started in March by friends Adam “Atom” Paul and Sean U’Ren, pay $15 to $20 for the chance to make a five-minute video in eight hours flat; tapes are due back to the organizers when the time’s up–no exceptions–and the results are screened the following night for an audience of participants, festival judges, and curious bystanders. Prizes have ranged from $80 for first place to “some fake press-on nails and bubble soap” for the runners-up, though for this weekend’s festival the stakes are higher: first prize is $1,700 worth of donated editing software. Festival themes are chosen by Paul and U’Ren. The first installment required the filmmakers to find inspiration in a particularly oblique haiku, the third (in October) in a passage from Edgar Allan Poe’s “Berenice.”
Paul and U’Ren, who met while film students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, were inspired by a grad student there “who had a 12-hour film festival,” says Paul. “It was film, it was sound, it was everything, and people were running around like crazy….For me it was one of the best days I’ve had in my whole film career.” The organizers say they don’t have much time to do their own work lately, and the festival is “a really cool way to sort of put a gun to people’s heads and say ‘Go make something.’”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Suzy Poling.
