Ohio is home to many exciting film festivals each year. Most notably would be the annual 48-hour film festival that challenges filmmakers to create movies in only two days. One festival that is currently underway is called 3 Weeks of Terror, which is hosted by the Mid Ohio Filmmakers Association (MOFA). In spirit of this spooky time of the year, filmmakers around the Columbus area are tasked with creating short horror movies in only three weeks. Each team is given a certain horror sub-genre and a prop to use.
Senior Wes Murray, film and media production major, is participating in the event.
“I’ve been into film making pretty much all my life,” Murray said. “I remember back when I was 8-years-old, I would grab the neighborhood kids and my mom’s camera. There was no script or anything, we just went out and used what we had.”
Murray is from Lewis Center, Ohio, and came to Capital in 2015 after being impressed by the school’s film program.
“The program was still fairly small then. We were still in the basement of the library doing CapTV and stuff.”
A lifelong love of film production has led Murray to create and collaborate on critically-acclaimed projects such as Buzzing in the Garage and Low Blow, which won the Audience Award at Capital University’s 48 hour Film Royale in 2017. Murray and his team won the previous 3 Weeks of Terror that was held last year with their film called Refuge. This year, he’s hoping for a repeat.
“We started planning a month before the event even started with pre-production. We knew we wanted to film the first weekend, and get production out of the way, so that there’s a lot of time for post-production. When we actually went to the event to get our subgenre and prop, we had so much less stress this year than any other year.”
Murray believes that being proactive when participating in film competitions is the best way to go. Every movie goes through three stages before being released to audiences. Those three stages are pre-production, production, and post-production. Murray says that the actual production of the film is definitely the hardest. To remedy this, it’s always best to put a lot of hours into the planning phase (pre-production).
“If you don’t plan that stuff out in pre-production, production is just going to be one hell of a time.”
“The prop we got were headphones, and our subgenre is found footage,” said Murray. “The gist of the story is about a father talking about his daughter who has been missing for about two weeks. We then follow the story of the daughter through B-roll to see why she has been missing for so long.”
Murray then dove into the inspirations behind the team’s upcoming project. Some of the films that they drew inspiration from are The Thing, Children of The Corn, Rosemary’s Baby, Annihilation, and Nightmare on Elm Street. With such horror masterpieces driving the creative process, Murray’s new project is bound to pack some haunting thrills. Though no official date has been released yet, the 3 Weeks of Terror screening event is bound to be held in late October. Updates can be found on MOFA’s website.
