Announcing: Science Films USC!

Ok, so here is the announcement I promised last week. Science Films USC! It is a film-making competition! The first of its kind at USC, I think. Right now, all there is to say is that we welcome teams of USC students from Cinematic Arts, Communications, Science, Engineering, and beyond, to enter the competition. They will present a short film that explains and/or illustrates a scientific concept, principle, or issue, for a wide non-expert audience. The first prize will be $2500. Yes, we are giving a serious prize for what we hope will be a serious competition with some wonderful entries. We’ll have a film festival in January, some prize-giving, and maybe some interesting people connected with the film world at the award ceremony. Of course, we’ll have it early in the award season, in January.

You can learn more at sciencefilms.usc.edu and for those of you who can’t bear to be away from facebook for long, also at facebook.com/sciencefilmsusc.

By August 31st, we will announce the details of the eligibility requirements, rules, and opportunities for those who are not well-resourced to get a small grant to help out with developing their film.

Teams, said I? Yes. As you know from many of my posts here and the work I’ve done in the past, I think that the future of better presentations of science in the media and entertainment, etc, is to get communicators and scientists working together and learning more about each other’s craft. In this way, we get more respect and appreciation for what it takes to do a good job on both “sides” of the aisle. Along the way we build friends and contacts that may be of value in the future too. This all begins with collaboration. Hence this competition. Teams must be constituted in a satisfactory way to bring such people together, or they simply can’t enter a film. We’ll build it into how teams enter the competition.

People will find each other to make up teams if they don’t already have friends/colleagues in disciplines other than their own by using…. facebook. We will try to set up meet and greet space at the facebook site (or elsewhere if necessary) to facilitate this.

Spread the word to the USC community -tell your friends, your students and professors, tell your class…. look out for the posters and flyers that will appear later in the week.

More later.

-cvj