This spring, students from the University of South Carolina found success at Campus Movie Fest through their quirky film “The Mix.” Now, their peers can watch the film again through Amazon Prime Video.
Directed by third-year law student Dallas Meacham, the film chronicles an evil pancake mix that comes to life and begins to take over the world. Meacham says that the idea for the film came from a class he took last year.
“Last year ... in my copyright class, we covered a case about a movie that involved alien yogurt coming to earth and taking over everybody,” Meacham said. “We watched the trailer for it and I was like ‘that is weird, I bet we could kind of play off of that.'”
“The Mix” was selected by Campus Movie Fest as one of the Top 25 student-created films of the year and won the festival’s Golden Tripod award at USC.
Campus Movie Fest starts in February and gives students a week to create a five-minute film.
“You have ... a week to do it all, and usually for us, we’re kind of brainstorming leading up to it. Now that we’ve done it a couple of times, we know to anticipate when it’s going to be and we’ll ... start kicking around ideas so hopefully by that first day of the competition we can hit the ground running,” Meacham said. “Usually what happens is nobody can do anything until that weekend, so usually the Saturday and Sunday before it's due is when we do a bunch of the substantial work and then somebody edits it the night before.”
The film is in the style of a trailer and doesn’t have much dialogue. However, Meacham says that there was still a structure that went into producing and directing the film.
“We like to have ... a general idea ... everyone kind of ping pongs off ideas and we get an idea of the individual little parts and pieces we need,” Meacham said. “A trailer is kind of easy because ... we need these types of scenes because they’re pretty unanimous.”
Meacham films with a close circle of friends, and while none of them are film majors, he says that Campus Movie Fest has been a highlight of his time at USC.
“It’s something fun to do with no pressure involved ... we have fun doing it and that’s what we attribute any success to,” Meacham said. “I guess it translates to the screen.”
He hopes that in the future, other non-film students will take part in the festival.
“If you like doing it, do it,” he said.
Meacham expects to participate in his last Campus Movie Fest this spring before his graduation
from law schol.
“It’ll be nostalgic ... I’ll be sad. It truly is my ... favorite time of the year,” Meacham said. “You get to make something and do something and show it to a bunch of people and experience it with them for the first time live. It’s a very unique, kind of just bizarre thing.”
Meacham’s film is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video to all Prime customers.