Place and Placelessness 2011 Short Film Contest

Scroll this

Andrew Watson and Michael del Vecchio

The organizers of the 2011 Place and Placelessness Online Conference would like to invite submissions for this year’s short film competition and online plenary discussion.

The short films should aim to reveal the relationship between human culture and the environment, with specific attention to the theme of ‘seasons’. This theme is loosely defined, and may include perspectives on the four seasons (spring, summer, fall, winter), hunting and fishing seasons, seasonal migration, sporting or fashion seasons, seasoned timber/food, or any other creative sub-category. Length of the films should be somewhere around five (5) minutes. Each film will eventually be uploaded to YouTube a few days before the conference, and viewed by conference participants prior to the plenary discussion on the last day. The purpose of this competition and plenary discussion is not to produce cinematic masterpieces, but rather to encourage the use of multimedia and online tools as an alternative to traditional written forms of communication in broadening contemporary and historic understandings of human relationships with the natural world.

No high-quality video cameras are necessary, and Youtube provides a free online editor for creating short film projects. In the coming weeks, check this page again for a tutorial on how to edit footage using Youtube, as well as an in-progress film being worked on by one of the organizers. Applicants should send an email to conference organizers expressing interest in the competition, and outlining in rough terms or concepts what they would like to try, what their film might aim to accomplish, and how it would relate to the theme of ‘seasons’. Please send these emails to awatson@yorku.ca.

Finally, as a final enticement for those interested, three environmental history book packages (1st prize, $100; 2nd prize, $70; 3rd prize, $30) will be awarded as prizes to the best films of the competition, as chosen by the organizing committee.

Featured image: Photo by Yong Chuan Tan on Unsplash.

The following two tabs change content below.
My Twitter profile

Jim Clifford

Associate Professor at University of Saskatchewan
Jim Clifford is an associate professor of environmental history at the University of Saskatchewan. He published West Ham and the River Lea: A Social and Environmental History of London’s Industrialized Marshland, 1839–1914 with the UBC Press in 2017.

NiCHE encourages comments and constructive discussion of our articles. We reserve the right to delete comments that fail to meet our guidelines including comments under aliases, or that contain spam, harassment, or attacks on an individual.