Forest Park

The assignment their teacher gave them was simple – make a short film that begins with a phone call and ends with someone hanging up. Benson first-year students Dylan Martinez-Torres and Dariel Soriano Zamora ran it all the way to a small city populated by two very big and rather iconic monsters – Godzilla and Hedora.

The result, Sorry, Wrong Number, is one of the more than 90 films entered into the annual Best of PPS Film Festival. The festival is a celebration of exceptional student filmmaking that includes a showcase at the historic Hollywood Theatre. 

The fourth annual installment of the festival took place on May 21 and included a screening of 13 standout films. The films came from all over PPS and ran the gamut from Dylan and Dariel’s monster short to documentaries, film noir, and broadcast journalism. 

The movies and their makers included:

• The Handmade Mystery, Quinlyn Black, Ida B. Wells 

• Adrenaline Run, Wylan Kaochari, Franklin 

• Aircraft, Simon Obold Eshleman, McDaniel 

• Ex Games, Max Sonera-Gregg and Dash Hampson, Franklin

• Failing, Oscar Peck, Franklin

• Ice Skater, Cassandra English, Benson 

• Romeo: The Search for Juliet, Otto Eichman and Indie Becker, Franklin

• Seventeen, Josh Fajardo, Franklin

• The Case of the Golden Tap Shoes, Ruby Ribbetoe-Crawford and Astrid Robin, Franklin

• The Portland Skate Scene, Fiona Reynolds, Roosevelt

• Urban Outlaws, Ruby Ribbetoe-Crawford and Cooper Deale, Franklin

• You Play?, Francis Bolton (Franklin), Jacoby and Beckett Lundgren (Ida B. Wells), and Ramai King (Roosevelt)

Every film introduced fresh voices, new ideas, and exciting and novel ways to tell a story. In the case of Sorry, Wrong Number, the moment Benson digital media instructor Steve Curley saw it, he knew he had to enter it into the festival.

“First of all, it was the only animated entry,” Curley said. “Everybody else used one of our cameras, but Dylan and Dariel shot their fight scene on the green screen, then Dylan took the footage home and rotoscoped it. By the way, I did not teach Dylan rotoscoping. He did that on his own. Typically, we don’t get into that until junior year.”

For all the novices out there, rotoscoping is a sophisticated animation technique whereby a filmmaker traces over live action frame-by-frame. Dylan has also experimented with stop-motion.

For Sorry, Wrong Number, he was inspired by two videos in particular: a stop-motion Godzilla versus Hedorah short and a rotoscope animation of Curious George and the Man in the Yellow Hat.

“I thought rotoscoping might actually save me some time with the animation,” Dylan said, “and, since the monsters were pretty humanoid, it was pretty easy to draw with them.” 

Prior to the film screening portion of the film fest, Dylan, Dariel, and the other student filmmakers had the chance to meet and chat with representatives from top college cinema and art departments as part of a Film College and Pathways Fair. The fair is an opportunity for high schoolers to learn more about university film programs and the pathways they offer student filmmakers.

Being freshmen, Dariel and Dylan are keeping their career options open, but Dylan said that, for now, it’s enough if people watch Sorry, Wrong Number with a smile on their face.

“I just want people to be entertained,” he said.