Crowds watch at the Carmike Majestic Theater during the screening of the short films created during the 2015 edition of the Capture community filmaking competition.How it works
› Capture 2016 begins with the theme announcement at 5:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 16, at TechTown, 325 Market St., Suite 200. The kickoff event is free to attend.› Interested video contributors must pay a $5 registration fee at capturefilmproject.org/register-tickets. After the event begins, contributors will have until 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 17, to shoot and upload up to five 30-second videos to a central server.› After submission, four teams of editors and musicians — two groups in Chattanooga, two in Kansas City — will compile and score short films lasting three to five minutes. These must be submitted by noon Sunday, Sept. 18.› The presentation of the final films and the awards ceremony will take place 5:30-8:30 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 18, at Cine-Rama, 100 W. Main St. Tickets are $10 and available online at capturefilmproject.org/register-tickets.
Local teams
› Team 1: Film editors Sannah Parker, Robert Winslow, Amanda Reno and Michael Graham. Musicians John Cotton and Erik Simpson.› Team 2: Film editors Bo Wheeler and Emily Compton. Musician Jonathan Tryezz Fowlkes.
Past Capture themes
› 2013: “Simple Beauty”› 2014: “Light & Shadow”› 2015: “Origins”› 2016: To be announced
If there's one lesson to be learned from the wide world of cinema, it's that people love to root for an underdog.
In 2013, the Association for Visual Arts started Capture, a community filmmaking project during which teams of filmmakers and musicians engage in a 48-hour creative sprint to edit and score short film using clips shot and uploaded by local residents. Last year, a new wrinkle was introduced when three teams in Chattanooga were pitted against a trio of competitors in Kansas City, Mo.
Ultimately, the Best in Show award last year went to the Show Me State team of Kyle Hamrick and Mark Buergler. During this year's competition, which takes place this weekend, the Scenic City is banking on a "Rocky"-like comeback to reclaim the trophy from Kansas City, whose metro population is four times larger than Chattanooga's. (Not to make excuses or anything.)
"It's really a point of pride," laughs Zachary Cooper, AVA's director of media and the project lead for Capture. "They're prideful of having that trophy there and that title. They'd like to retain it, but we'd like it back."
This year, the competition has been slightly scaled back by reducing the field to just two teams per city.
Capture will kick off Friday, Sept. 16, when the theme of this year's event will be announced. Afterward, registered amateur videographers in Chattanooga and Kansas City will have 24 hours to shoot and upload up to five 30-second clips based on their interpretation of that theme to a server provided by EPB.
Once the submission period concludes on Saturday afternoon, Sept. 17, the filmmaking teams and composers will have access to the combined pool of clips from both cities. By noon Sunday, Sept. 18, they'll submit finalized films of three to five minutes with musical scores to judge Patricia Zimmerman, a professor of screen studies at Ithaca College in Ithaca, N.Y.
All the films will be screened, and a Best in Show announced, during an event Sunday evening at Cine-Rama with a live streamed connection between teams in Chattanooga and Kansas City.
During last year's event, Cooper says, about 190 registered videographers in both cities submitted "over 100 gigabytes" of clips to EPB's server. That speaks to the popularity of the concept - "there's nothing else quite like it," he says - but on a philosophical level, the event lends a sense of purpose to the otherwise gluttonous shooting most people engage in on their smartphone.
"Sometimes, having a camera in our hands is so ubiquitous at times that you don't think about it," Cooper says. "When you go on vacation, you take 1,000 photos, but you have no intent with 90 percent of them. You're just shooting to shoot.
"This gives intent to a very powerful device in your hand in order to communicate culture and to communicate your place in the world and your place in the city."
Contact Casey Phillips at cphillips@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6205. Follow him on Twitter at @PhillipsCTFP.