The CSU Sprung festival is a festival put together by the 3rd Theatre Media students, to show off their major works. The festival is hosted for a week usually in person, but due to the pandemic that has occurred this year the entire festival has been moved online to a digital performance. This is a first for the Sprung festival, in the past some shows have had production that were digitally show either by recording or livestreaming, but this year every production had to be digitally accessible. Due to regulations caused by the pandemic only Theatre Media students were allowed to enter a production into the festival. Being all online led to some different ways of creating the productions and bringing them to life from found footage, a movie, livestreaming or multi-format (using more than one of the above formats). the 2020 festival had 5 productions; Le Papillon, Paper flowers, Lloyd.MP4, Pirates! and Garry Smith: Enlightenment. This review is going to be on the latter 4 of these productions, as I participated in the 1st mentioned production.
Paper Flowers is a story about an abuse of power in relationships, having our protagonist being held back and down by their spouse. The spouse controls the entire life of our protagonist and does so by emotional manipulation and buying gifts they can not afford. The digital format for this production is a combination of video, photo and text. The company created a show through different formats and brought it all together on a single site. The meaning of this story is that no one controls your worth other than yourself and to not let someone try and convince you they can determine your worth. I think the crew did an amazing job at portraying what the wanted to, while giving us a female rise to self-power story.
Lloyd.MP4 is a found footage film about a group of murderous masked people who chase a man around at night. This production follows the usual genre for found footage films which is horror, the team behind this short horror story had to censor the original script as it was to graphic. The staging of this place suits the film perfecting going around locations of the CSU Bathurst campus, leaving us just a little afraid to go out of our dorms at night.
Garry Smith: Enlightenment is a comedy talk show/conspiracy mystery the story is about the number talk show host going missing for 5 years and finding out what happened? this 3 episodic comedy was very entertaining keep me invested in the story the entire way through. The group used multiple locations and filming techniques to watch this work, from steady locked cam to shaky cam and even just voiceovers. Garry Smith was an intriguing tale of one mans experience with conspiracy, backstabbing and having one hell of a story a tell.
Pirates! was a very unique episodic show with 4 episodes each on different formats of media, the first was filmed, the second was an Instagram page with a story to show, the third was just voiceovers and the final episode was livestreamed. the story was about pirates stealing digital code and information from the web and each other. The show proved that switching up the medium can work when you properly do it and that you do not need to stick to a single format to tell a entertaining story. Pirates! was comedic while teaching you to not be willy-nilly about your information, unless it is to protect yourself from them.
As I worked on Le Papillon I will just briefly say what it was about, the show was filmed entirely and was about a female dealing with heavy anxiety and moved to an isolated hotel which she owned, where she controlled all variables. A British customer comes along showing her a life she dreams of and he pushes her to take back her control of her own life, but she is hesitant due to her past traumas. This show is a peek behind the curtain of people dealing with anxiety.
The festival moved online changed the entire way the show worked and in the future this means that there is now an option to produce a production via live performance or performed digitally. Hopefully in the future students from all degrees will be able to produce a production either digitally or in person.
