Dinner and a show
A glimpse into the annual gathering of the Rod Serling Video Festival contest judges

Elizabeth Cohen, Staff Writer
Binghamton Press/Sun Bulletin, May 16, 2007

It's a spectacular evening, warm but not muggy, the trees blushing green with their first spring leaves, when we all arrive at the Town of Binghamton home of Mark Levy. He's our host this year and every year. We spread out on his back patio in the lingering May light, swatting away perhaps the very first mosquitoes of the year, and everyone has at least one plate of the catered dinner fare.
This year it's spicy grilled chicken, burgers, hot dogs and quadruple-layer carrot cake. Pass by that cake without taking a piece -- I just dare you.
But we're here for serious business: To perform our annual duty as judges of the Rod Serling Video Festival, which is one of the nicest things I have ever been asked to do. And by the looks of the other eight judges' faces, as they trickle in, they feel the same way.
We settle in to chat about life and family (it's been a year since many of us have seen each other) and to meet the two new judges this year: Gary Ingraham, a Cornell University documentary film producer and director, and Christina Rockhill, a WBNG producer who has worked as a broadcast journalist in the Iraq war in Baghdad. OK, we are all properly humbled.

CINEMA PARADISIO
After eating and chatting, we settle down to the work at hand: Watching videos made by kids.
To do this we head for our next stop, an actual, I-kid-you-not, theater, in Levy's house. "We don't call it Mark's viewing room. We call it Hoyt's annex," says Lawrence Kassan, the festival's founder and director. "New York State fire laws dictate that I show you the exits to the theater."
"And can we use our seats as flotation devices?" asks Gregory Keeler, fellow judge and the WSKG "morning guy" among other jobs, whose voice always makes me crave a cup of coffee.

DID YOU HEAR THE ONE ABOUT ...?
In past years, we start out our evening with a little video by our host, Levy himself, who makes shorts out of really bad jokes that Kassan tells him, usually starring his friends and family. ("Did you hear the one about the pirate ... ?)
This campy appetizer sets the stage for the feast ahead, a video smorgasbord straight from the imaginations and cameras of kids.

What the judges all know from doing this over the years is that if you give a kid a camera, something magical can happen.
In past years, kids have made videos about everything from a poetic reflection on being a soldier in a war to "The Social Drawbacks of Living in a Box" to a slew of zombie flicks.

WIDE RANGE OF WORK
Some years, these entrants seem Hollywood bound; other years, they seem more suitable for the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Some years, they are great, and others, they're, well, let's just say they're not so great.
This year, we are served up some fantastic claymation. For some reason, every kid from here to Albany seems to have gotten clay (and a camera) for Christmas.
There is one about a penguin who morphs into a dancing clarinet; one about a little pirate mouse that finds a treasure chest full of Hanukkah gelt. There is one about a bear, one about "a blob" and this year's festival winner, we judges decide, a claymation about a lonely scarecrow that is truly artful.

VIDEOS IMITATE HOLLYWOOD
"We tend to get videos similar to movies that have been out that year," says Kassan.
When "The Matrix" came out, the festival got some Matrix clones. When "Pulp Fiction" came out, "we got a lot of ketchup," he says. "When 'Blair Witch' came out, we got one about a stalker."
The technology is so good nowadays that any kid with a computer can make a movie with a lot of bells and whistles. "But what we like to see is a film with a storyboard, too," Kassan says.
This year, we get some storyboards. We see a video about a sword fight (we almost always get one of these) and one about a girl who is dissuaded from suicide by a ghostly boyfriend.

DECISION PROCESS
After viewing we talk, we discuss, sometimes we argue (just a tad) and then we vote. We make up the winning categories to suit the best videos instead of the other way around. Which is why we get awards like "best use of parents in a zombie movie." OK, I'm kidding. But we do make up categories to fit the strengths of videos.
That is why this year you'll see that there is a "best use of music," "a best screenplay," for a Rod Serlingesque piece about two brothers locked in a room and all these "best claymations."

BIGGER AND BETTER
Every year the festival gets a little bigger, with more and more entries that come from a little farther away. I hear that next year we have videos that have already been sent in from Latin American and Australia.
It is always super fun just to see what kids come up with, which never fails to surprise and delight the judges. Although, admittedly, they confuse the heck out of us sometimes, too (which has been called the "what-the-heck factor," or something like that)
Kids, videos. A spring night. What more could you want?
Come to the gala award screening to see them yourself on June 1 at the Helen Foley Theatre at Binghamton High School.
Next year, we are anticipating a lot of "Grindhouse"-inspired works. Which should make for another memorable night of judging. Oh yeah.