UAB Digital Film Festival 2011

The UAB Digital Film Festival, hosted by the Department of Computer and Information Sciences (CIS), provides an opportunity for Alabama K-12 students to create video games and animated movies using Alice or Scratch and submit them to a competition. Movies and video games from the film festival are shown at a special event and awards are given in several categories.

News!

This year's film festival will take place on April 28, 2012. The specific time and program will be defined soon.

What is The Digital Film Festival?

• This is the new version of the Alice Film Festival. Our Computer and Information Sciences department is committed to motivate the young minds of our community to pursue careers in computer science and related fields. In previous years we have organized an Alice Film Festival where students from elementary to high school submit movies made with Alice to our contest. To make this contest accessible to more students in our community  the Digital Film Festival will now accept movies that are made with other popular programming environments, such as Scratch.

Overview

• All students in Alabama public, private, and home schools are invited to participate.

• To prepare for the contest, students independently create Alice or Scratch programs that represent a video game, movie, cartoon, or video. The movies are submitted electronically to the UAB judges prior to the film festival. Each movie is judged for an award. All movies are shown after the keynote presentation.

• All submissions will be shown once during the Film Festival on May 14th, 2011. Those receiving awards must be present at the festival.

• The official rules are available here. Please read the rules carefully to ensure that submissions are not disqualified.

Registration

There is a registration fee of $10.00 per submission and the deadline for registering to the Digital Film Festival is May 1st. Follow this link to register:

 

Submission Information (Updated!)

Please follow this link to create an account and submit your animation: http://dff.cis.uab.edu

 

Directions and Parking Information

Directions on how to get to the Computer and Information Sciences department can be found here.

Parking information can be found here.

List of Prizes*

All participants will receive a T-shirt and a certificate of participation. Prizes will be awarded to contestants with the top three scores computed from different categories (Elementary School, Middle School, High School). Thanks to the generosity of our sponsors we will be able to offer over $3000 in prizes this year.

There is no team category for elementary school students.

*Note that prizes are subject to the availability of items in stores and to changes due to budget restrictions.

Official Program and Schedule (Updated)

Digital Film Festival -Saturday May 14, 2011
11:00-12:00	Check-in and collection of materials	CIS lobby
12:00-12:30	CIS tour	CIS lobby
12:30-1:00	Welcome Session and Lunch	CH 405
1:00-1:15	Break
1:15 - 2:00	Special event from g8four	CH 405
2:00-3:00	Showcase of all submissions	CH 405
3:00-3:15	Break
3:15-4:15	Keynote Address: Karen Brennan	CH 405
4:30 - 5:00	Awards presentation  (HSPC & DFF)	CH 405

 

 The keynote speaker this year will be Karen Brennan.

Karen Brennan is a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab and a member of the Scratch Team. Her research is primarily concerned with the ways in which learning communities support computational creators. More concretely, her work focuses on Scratch and the Scratch educator community, studying how participation in the Scratch online community and how professional development for educators can support young people as creators of computational media.

• Dr. Thamar Solorio (Chair)
• Amin Hassan (Session organizer and judge coordinator)
• Hadia Ahmed (Judge)
• Soma Halder (Judge)
• Richa Tiwari (Judge and t-shirt designer)
• Joel Tully (Judge)
• Jia Ma (Judge)
• Zekai Demirezen (Judge and schedule coordinator)
• Wei-Bang Chen (Judge)
• Sagar Thapaliya (t-shirt designer)
• Sam Cleveland (Submission System coordinator)

 

 

To contact the organizers, please send and email to dff@cis.uab.edu, or call (205)-934-8697.

Related Event: The UAB High School Programming Contest (HSPC) brings talented students from high schools throughout Alabama to the UAB campus to participate in an organized competition. Students individually compete to demonstrate their programming skills and problem solving abilities by attempting to solve six programming problems within a three hour period. Schools that have more than three contestants are also eligible for team awards. More information about the HSPC is available here.

Related Event: The CIS Department offers the UAB Summer Computer Camps - a 4-week series of summer camps for high school and middle school students. If you are interested in the camps, more information is available here.

Invitation: If you are interested in attending the event as an observer (not as a formal participant), please express your interest by sending an email to alice-festival@cis.uab.edu.

Page last updated: February 25th, 2011