Russell Theatre buzzes with anticipated chatter from family and friends that have come out to support students. The lights dim and a wave of silence engulfs the theatre. A picture is projected onto the screen and the movie begins.

On Monday, June 4th the IB Film Studies students held the RBSS Film Festival in which they debuted their student made movies. A total of seven movies were shown, each made with careful planning and long hours of work.

The festival itself is a mock Academy Awards/Oscar presentation where after the films have been shown, the students take part in an award ceremony. This award ceremony is an annual event that takes place once at the end of every school year.

In each of the 7 film classes, students chose how they were going to contribute to the movie by signing up for positions such as director, producer, cinematographer and cam­era person.

“The films are our end of the year project in which we took everything we learned and everyone’s best skills to use. It wasn’t easy, but I’m looking forward to the audience’s re­action,” said junior Jules Graham.

The students all pitched ideas and voted for the one they wanted to be the theme of their movie. This was the first step towards a long, stressful, but rewarding process in the film making.

The overall theme of the festival was “Scare Your Pants Off”, so the students had to get creative with how they were going to come up with an original piece that would scare the audience members’ pants off.

“Rosie” was one of the films some film students such as juniors Bobby Decanio, Mad­die Rose and Yae Ji Cha created. It’s about a doll named Rosie that is owned by a little girl, who was played by one of the IB Film teacher’s daughter, that gets taken away by her mother.

Working with children and multiple types of film equipment were some of the many creative factors that went into the cre­ation of these films.

“It became stressful at times because of tech problems or cooperating with the little kids because the little problems always took up time and we had a deadline to meet,” said Decanio.

After the films had been viewed, English teachers judged the movies. Students and the film advisors presented awards to the film makers. They were nominated in multiple dif­ferent categories such as best director, best cinematography and best film.

After the awards had been passed out and pictures had been taken, the film students brought their productive school year to an end with a rewarding night.

Cha said,“It was fun and stressful work­ing with different personalities and different ideas because everyone sees the film in a dif­ferent way. Overall the whole process was a great experience.”