The 2010 series of Camp Kuleshov competitions for Association of Independent Creative Editors (AICE) assistant editors got off to a fast start in the Big Apple with assistant editor David Otte of Red Car, New York, winning the trailer editing competition on the strength of Freaky Friday. He took the top honor at the AICE N.Y. chapter contest with his re-envisioning of the 2003 Disney comedy as a spine-tingling horror flick.
Camp Kuleshov is AICE’s annual trailer-editing contest in which assistant editors are tasked with taking Hollywood films ranging from smash hits to more obscure titles and re-editing or combining them to create either new films or to re-position them in a different genre than they were originally released. Different AICE chapters hold their own iterations of the event in order to help showcase the cutting talents of assistant editors.
The winners of the New York chapter competition this year all took films from the list of candidates for the contest and re-worked them to fit different genres.
Second place honors in the AICE N.Y.’s Camp Kuleshov contest were presented to assistant editor Anthony Muzzatti of Big Sky Editorial, N.Y., for Monkey Mandingo, his take on the 1968 Charlton Heston classic Planet of the Apes, re-spun as a 1970s style exploitation film.
Third place honors went to assistant editor Jason Sager of The Whitehouse, N.Y., for Moonstruck, his take on the 1987 romantic comedy retooled as a sci-fi film.
In addition, an honorable mention went to assistant editor Adam Weiss of BlueRock for Super Coach, in which he recast director Tobe Hooper’s 1982 supernatural thriller Poltergeist as a super-hero/comic book film.
All the winners were honored Thursday night (10/21) during an awards celebration at Bar M1-5 in Manhattan, which drew some 80 members of the New York creative editorial and postproduction community.
Prizes for the Camp Kuleshov winners were donated by Avid. Otte was rewarded with an Avid Media Composer 5; Muzzatti won a Mbox 2 headset and Sager won a set of Studiophile Q40 headphones. Judges for the New York event were editors Chris Franklin of Big Sky Editorial, Lin Polito of jumP, Mark Nickelsburg of Homestead Editorial and Karen Kourtessis of Crew Cuts. Also on the jury was Rob Schnapp, senior VP/creative director at Y&R, New York.
To screen the winners, visit the Camp Kuleshov New York page on the AICE web site here.
Camp plans in L.A., Chicago
Meanwhile, AICE chapters in Chicago and Los Angeles have unveiled the rules of engagement for their own Camp Kuleshov competitions, along with deadlines and requirements.
The deadline for entering Camp Kuleshov Chicago is Monday, November 1. All interested parties can register for the competition on the AICE web site’s Camp Kuleshov Chicago page, which can be found here.
The contest is open to full-time assistant editors at AICE member companies. A category of the competition called Tent City is open to entries submitted by freelance assistants who are sponsored by AICE member companies, as well as by interested parties employed at member companies such as interns, P.A.s, librarians, receptionists, etc.
The Chicago chapter competition requires entrants to take two films, Burn After Reading and Ocean’s 11, and combine elements from both to create a new film. As pointed out by The Whitehouse, Chicago producer Dawn Guzowski, who’s heading up the event, both films star George Clooney and Brad Pitt. “We thought it would be an interesting twist to have the assistants play off the characters and mingle them,” she noted.
The awards show will be hosted at the Bottom Lounge in Chicago on Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2010. For more information on the event, please contact Guzowski at dawn@whitehousepost.com.
In Los Angeles, the Camp Kuleshov contest has an entry deadline of October 29. As with the Chicago competition, it’s open to full-time assistants as well to junior assistants, P.A.’s and runners at AICE member shops or sponsored by an AICE member. The L.A. Camp Kuleshov competition takes a roster of recent films ranging from Avatar to Slumdog Millionaire and requires the entrants to re-cut the film’s trailer to completely change its genre. Entrants can choose from a list of genres ranging from dramedy to horror.
For additional information on the event, contact Kristin Branstetter at The Whitehouse/Los Angles at kristin@whitehousepost.com, or Gail Butler at Hybrid Edit at gail@hybridedit.com. Full rules and registration for Camp Kuleshov L.A. can be found on the AICE web site by clicking here.
AICE announced in September that all of its chapters that participated in the annual trailer editing competitions would now adopt the name Camp Kuleshov for each one, identified further by the chapter name as well. Among the names the competition has gone by at various AICE chapters in the past are Trailer Park, Splice Capades, The Winnebago Awards, Filmspotting, Trailer Blazin’ and Trailer Wars.
The New York chapter first adopted the Camp Kuleshov moniker and has used it since 2008. The name is a nod to Lev Kuleshov, the early Russian filmmaker and film theorist whose demonstrations of the power of juxtaposing film images to radically alter audiences’ emotional responses to films came to be known as “The Kuleshov Effect.”
The Chicago Chapter originated the competition for assistants in 2002, created by editors Steve Stein and Kathryn Hempel of Cutters as a way to challenge and honor hard-working assistant editors.
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