INUVIK
The show did go on over the weekend as the Reel Film Festival made a stop at the Inuvik Youth Centre.

The Reel Youth Film Festival rolled into Inuvik last week with stops at East Three school and the Inuvik Youth Centre. On March 7, 10 youth showed up to film their own scary movie with help from the festival, including festival director Mark Vonesch, back row, right. - Shawn Giilck/NNSL photo

Reel Youth is a British Columbia-based organization that travels through the North and western Canada teaching the basic elements of the filmmaking business to youth.

For the second consecutive year, Reel Youth visited East Three school teaching claymation techniques while giving interested youth the chance to make their own horror movies at the youth centre.

The process was well underway during the afternoon of March 7 with nearly a dozen young people at the centre taking a first look at their efforts.

There was a lot of laughter and giggling to be heard as the children saw themselves on camera but it was plain to see they were taking the process seriously as well.

Maddysen Kingmiaqtuq-Devlin was participating in the workshop for the second year. She is definitely one young talent who knows her way around the video business, both technical and creative, since her father, Tony Devlin, is a professional videographer and producer.

"We're making horror movies and there are two different scripts. The one I'm working with is about a man having hallucinations and I'm the hallucination.

"I disappear and re-appear everywhere, so it feels like he's going crazy," she continued. "The idea came from all of us. We all contributed ideas, and we picked the top two."

Maddysen called the process "exciting."

"It's a different story this time, as compared to last year, and my character isn't real, so it's very different. My favourite part is the acting."

With her background in video work, it's perhaps not surprising that Maddysen doesn't consider the technical aspects of editing and processing to be daunting.

"It's pretty easy, really," she said. "Sometimes I prefer being in front of the camera."

Kiersten Rogers was working with another group on a rather different script.

"In our movie there's this girl who is dead but doesn't know it," she said with enthusiasm. "I'm playing her sister.

"This is the first time I've had a chance to work on something like a movie, and it's like you expect something else after you've had a chance to film it, and then it's so funny to see it. It's weird to watch yourself."

Rogers said she enjoyed both being behind the camera and the acting. She said she wanted to strive for perfection in the process, but realized that would be a long process.

Mark Vonesch, the director of Reel Youth, was impressed with what he was seeing.

"We're here in Inuvik for a week. We started with an issue-based animation project for a week at the school, having student identify issues they care about and things they want to see happen in their community and producing animation films about it.

"Now we're in the midst of a three-day scary movie program, where youth identify fears and things that scare them, and then develop a short film around it."

Scary movies in the North are extremely popular, he added.

"It's the only place we do them, and for us it's a great way to engage the youth not only on technical skills but also on leadership skills."

Vonesch said "we've got an awesome group of young people signed up to participate, and the films will be very strong. We've got some really interesting stories, and we've got a nine-year-old up to an 18-year-old, so it's really cool to have that diversity.

"We've talked about the technical filmmaking and tomorrow we'll be getting into editing, and a month from now we'll be having a festival screening with all the animations from the school and these horror films will be shown, along with the best of youth filmmaking from around the world."

That festival will be held in Inuvik sometime in April, Vonesch said.