Student film semifinalist in online competition

2:21 p.m., June 4, 2004--A short film created by UD students Matt McDonald and Megan Hoffman is one of 30 semifinalists in Microsoft’s international Imagine Cup Short Film Invitational. When the results of online voting are announced, Hoffman and McDonald could advance to the worldwide finals in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in July.

Hoffman, a senior communication major, saw the Microsoft contest on a listserv and asked McDonald to help her produce a film about a computer programmer who has a mental block. The script, which has no dialogue, focuses on the process of innovation. The only sound is the soundtrack written by McDonald, a senior engineering major. Hoffman made the storyboards for the film, and McDonald’s band, I, Fanblades, played the music.

McDonald said the partners were surprised that their film was chosen as one of the best in the nationwide contest.

“We were really surprised that they liked it so much,’’ she said. “We had known it was pretty good work, but then we had to compress it from 1.7 gigabytes down to 30 megabytes, and we lost a lot of the quality doing it.’’

The results of online voting will be announced on June 15 at [www.imaginecup.com/shortfilm_gallery.aspx ]

Article by Kathy Canavan

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