Catching creativity: Capture 2015 adds new wrinkle, another city

Chattanooga’s Capture has grabbed the imagination of another city.

Going into its third year, organizers of the event, in which films are shot, edited, put to music and debuted in a 48-hour monsoon of creativity, were looking for something new to spice things up. So they reached out to other cities to see if they wanted to join the fun.

They immediately got a bite from Kansas City.

“We thought about it and considered it after last year,” says Zach Cooper, director of media and design at the Association of Visual Arts in Chattanooga. “We knew we wanted to go into another city, but we didn’t know how that would look.”

One criteria was that the second city had to have high-speed Internet similar to EPB’s Gig, which has one-gigabit-per-second capability. Kansas City is one of nine cities in the country that has high-speed Google Fiber, so AVA officials got in touch with filmmaking folks there.

“Everybody jumped on board and that’s how it all got rolling,” Cooper says.

“This was a pretty quick decision,” says Steven Fuller, who has the nifty title of Idea Instigator at Film Society KC. “It was a no-brainer. Kansas City is the crossroads of the country, and we have an amazing film and technology community.”

The same week, Kansas City is hosting its first Techweek, an annual technology conference that’s now in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Detroit. Blending Techweek with Capture made sense, Fuller says.

“This was the perfect opportunity for us to bring the film and tech community together for this exciting weekend-long event.”

Capture begins at 5:30 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 18, when this year’s theme will be announced. For Capture’s debut in 2013, the theme was “Simple Beauty”; in 2014 it was “Light & Shadow.”

Once the theme is revealed, dozens of filmmakers – both professional and would-be – hit the streets of Chattanooga to film 30-second clips on digital cameras, smartphones and other devices. By 4 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 19, those clips must be sent by Internet to three local filmmaking teams who will cherry-pick from the submissions and create three- to five-minute films based on the theme. Local musicians will then provide music for the films.

That’s why high-speed fiber networks are needed. Film clips are submitted over the Internet and, with dozens being sent during a 24-hour window – 2014’s Capture had more than 70 local people making the clips and sending them in, Cooper says – it’s critical to have plenty of bandwidth so they all get through in time.

For the finals, two local filmmaking teams will go head-to-head with the two teams from Kansas City. And they all must be finished by 8 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 20, when the films will premiere at the Majestic Theatre downtown.

Since Kansas City is much larger than Chattanooga when it comes to population – 2 million in KC’s metro area compared to about 500,000 here – there may be a bit of underdog feeling in Chattanooga when it comes to the contest. Which is not a bad thing.

“With Kansas City involved, the city pride comes out a little more, that creative spirit that Chattanooga is so good at comes out,” Cooper says.

Judging the films and picking the winners will be Mark Covino, whose documentary, 2012’s “A Band Called Death,” premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival and later won the Audience Award at South by Southwest in 2013.

With two years under their belt, Capture’s organizers say it’s getting easier to rev up Chattanooga’s creative types to get involved.

“Each year it’s always like a little bit of an ‘Oh wow,'” Cooper says. “(The community) is eager to contribute. The first year there was hesitation, sort of a ‘What is this?’ It got a little easier to tell that story in the second year.”

Contact features editor Shawn Ryan at sryan@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6327.