Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media
Students win film festival awards
By: Trenton Lively/CAS student writer
September 29, 2009
MSU students Peter Johnston, Jon Whiting and Dani Long won both the Jury award and the Audience award at the third annual Saginaw Film Festival held on Aug. 23.
The festival gives filmmakers in the area a chance to show their work in front of a local audience. Avid moviegoers as well as all the participants viewed a large variety of films running anywhere from one minute to 30 minutes long for no charge.
The trio’s award-winning documentary is titled, Golden Harvest: North Lansing Against the World!, and it focuses on a small diner in Old Town, Lansing, which caught their interest due to the restaurant’s odd location and its hardcore customer following.
Johnston and his peers, all telecommunication, information studies, and media master’s students, were looking forward to exposing audiences to the diner. “I was just happy to get people to see the piece and learn more about this incredible but almost hidden diner. It seemed like a diamond in the rough,” Johnston said.
The project was originally conceived in faculty member Bob Alber’s Digital Documentary class.