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Student shines at Media Arts Festival

The 18th annual Media Arts Festival will present this year’s best student piece in film, video, and interactive media throughout the 23 campus CSU system – and Sacramento State’s own art studio student, David Johnson, has been chosen as one of 35 finalists.

“I am very proud to have people seeing my work on this scale,” says Johnson. “The whole idea of it is very new to me. I really didn’t expect to be showing these videos to a large audience at all…it’s all very encouraging. It makes me eager to show people all of the other things I have been up to.”

Johnson will compete in the Experimental work category with his piece entitled Train. There are nine categories in which to submit a film: Animation, Documentary, Experimental, Interactive, Music Video, Narrative, Television, Feature Screenplay, and Short Screenplay. Experimental work, as Johnson explained, is a category that “is reserved for pieces that don’t fall into the traditional genres of media.”

Train doesn’t tell a story, but “captures the experience of an environment” and emphasizes with a combination of stills and video the everyday subtleties we are all more likely to overlook. The setting is a train yard, with plants, dirt, and bugs as some of the objects.  

“Essentially, it is about reality or how things really exist in the world in contrast to how we tend to simplify them for the sake of our convenience,” Johnson explains.

Johnson was inspired to do this type of video art while eating his lunch by the train tracks.

“The train was so long that after a while I found that I was getting distracted by all these other subtle things around me despite the overwhelming presence of this huge loud train,” he says. “It seemed amazing to me that even in the chaos of noise and shaking of the ground that these subtleties were almost more beautiful and significant by contrast.”

This new idea created some challenges in the production of the film. There is no plot, nor is there any narration. It was difficult to figure out how to translate the idea on video in a way that the audience would understand.

“You never know,” Johnson says. “Something could make sense to you through the whole process of making it, and then you show it to a group of people and they are all left scratching their heads.”

The art studio major student also had some trouble with figuring out how to work with moving images as well as stills.

“Hopefully I have been successful in one way or another,” he says. And to date, he has. This year the festival received 175 student submissions from 18 different CSU campuses.

Cash prizes include $1,000 and a Rosebud Award to Winner of best in show, $500 and a Rosebud Award to winner in each category, and $250 to the campus department of each winning category. Place awards will also be given out.

Along with the competition and the free screening, the CSU Summer Arts are also offering seminars with media specialists and events geared towards professional advancement for CSU students and faculty. The seminar fees for students are $20, $40 with quadruple occupancy lodging, and $60 with double occupancy lodging.

For more information about the Media Arts Festival, the seminars and last year’s winners, please visit mediaartsfestival.org.