Roll out the red carpet, throw on your cummerbund and brace yourself for Joan Rivers - the 34th Annual Student Academy Awards is just around the corner.
So maybe this award ceremony doesn't bring out quite enough star power for celebrity interviewers to come out to ask who's wearing who, but it does showcase the best and brightest of an up-and-coming generation of filmmakers.
This year a group of filmmakers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was recognized by the academy. The film "In the Wake of Catastrophe" was selected as a finalist for the awards in the documentary category.
Trevor Hall, a journalism and mass communications graduate student, was a co-producer and writer for the film, which was made as an in-depth report for UNL's College of Journalism and Mass Communications.
Hall said though his name was the one that accompanied the film to the award, a lot of the credit for the movie belonged to the other students that took part in the making the documentary.
Hall and a group of students and faculty members, including co-producer Kelly Mosier, travelled to Sri Lanka to study the rebuilding process following the devastating tsunami in 2004 that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
The group also visited New Orleans to study the ways the city was dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he said.
It was during this trip the premise for the documentary began to take shape, Hall said.
The group began to see the similarities tying the two tragedies together, such as how both disasters affected the poor, the young, the environment, race relations, global aid and the government.
"The tsunami destroyed a third world nation, and Katrina exposed a third world America," Hall explained.
It was this unique look at the two tragedies that Hall said got attention from the members of the academy.
Jerry Renaud, a broadcasting professor who worked on the project with the students, said the piece was chosen because at its core the film was a professional documentary that was well executed.
"It was a good documentary that was well done and well presented," Renaud said. "They did a terrific job."
Despite winning the regional contest, the documentary was not chosen as one of the final three medal winners at the award ceremony, so Hall and the other members of the film crew will not be making the trip to California for the June 9 awards ceremony.
Despite this setback, Hall said he still has big plans for the movie, which includes submissions to both the Milwaukee and New Orleans film festivals.
Hall said it was a great honor to be included as a finalist into the Student Academy Awards, especially since only one other film was chosen from a Big 12 conference school, a narrative titled "The Second Coming" from the University of Texas at Austin.
Hall said he has future plans in the documentary film business but is currently trying to get through graduate school. He said he identifies and looks up to other documentary filmmakers like former SAA medal winner Spike Lee, who also did his own documentary film about Katrina called "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts".
Hall had one piece of advise for other aspiring filmmakers.
"All it takes is a good idea," he said.
