NW Cornerstone students compete in film festival

Awards were given at the NW Texas Government Cornerstone students' Film Festival Dec. 4 on NW Campus. Left to right: Maggie Douglas received the best overall documentary award, Tiffany Duncan, best interview, Robert Smith, best director, and Morgan Staskus, best research. Photo by Yesenia Santillan/The Collegian
Awards were given at the NW Texas Government Cornerstone students’ Film Festival Dec. 4 on NW Campus. Left to right: Maggie Douglas received the best overall documentary award, Tiffany Duncan, best interview, Robert Smith, best director, and Morgan Staskus, best research.
Photo by Yesenia Santillan/The Collegian

By Yesenia Santillan/reporter

Who Framed Texas Government? won the Overall Documentary award at the NW Texas Government Cornerstone students’ Film Festival Dec. 4 in the NW Walsh Library.

A short film by Cornerstone student secretary Maggie Douglas was about the media’s influence on the government. It focused on how people today get their news from shows like The Colbert Report rather than CNN or local news because the media looks at what people are interested in, so they can get more people viewing their news. Douglas also touched on the way TV newscasts have changed because of this since TV has become the main source for news.

“You turn the news on, and you’re going to see some form of strategy,” she said. “Unfortunately, news networks don’t really tell you the news anymore. They’ve always got to kind of put a spin on it a certain way.”

Along with Douglas, Morgan Staskus received the Best Research award, Tiffany Duncan, Best Interview, and Robert Smith, Best Director.

Government professor Julie Lantrip said the film festival was developed to “offer her [Cornerstone] students to share their research” rather than just get written projects.

“It was a challenge for them, definitely a little bit more work than a paper,” she said. “But most of them felt that they could get a little bit more creative with the process.”

Cornerstone students could use their iPads they received at the beginning of the semester to do all the research, interviews and videos for their projects.

Lantrip said she plans to continue doing this film festival for her future Cornerstone students since they all would have iPads and her other classes don’t. She said more work would have to go into this kind of project “in a class where not everyone has an iPad.”

Lantrip might expand the experience to other classes “if I can figure out a way for the other students to have access to some kind of camera,” she said.