Wayne State College will be hosting its first ever Wildcat Spirit Film Festival tomorrow starting at 9:30 a.m.

There were over 120 short films submitted and the festival will run all day in Ramsey Theater. To be considered, the films had to be presented by high school or college undergraduate students in the United States.

“We had a lot of submissions—over 120 from all over the country,” said Michael White assistant communication arts professor. “It’s good for our students—they get to have the experience of going to a film festival.”

White started preparation for the department’s first film festival in July. In November, the department started taking submissions.

To White’s knowledge Wayne State is the only college in Nebraska that is hosting a film festival. He said WSC has one of the top leading video production programs in Nebraska.

White will be hosting a pre-production workshop from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. It will feature an acting for the screen workshop and a direction workshop for 30 high school students.

“Now that I’m here full time the tradition is to have a fall film and a spring film each year and those films are less than 20 minutes so they’re festival competition film,” said White. “The idea is if we’re going to compete in festivals we should have a film festival of our own. Then that would help the students to know how it works.”

Starting at 6 p.m. WSC students will be presenting their short films from the last two years: “The End,” “The Captain and Me,” “Orientation” and “Kerfuffle”.

There will be many film showings for viewers to choose from. Short films can last up to 45 minutes or as short as five minutes—which are considered short-short films. After the films have been shown, the casting crew will open up the floor to questions from the audience.

“The most important showing of the day is probably the high school regional showings. Those are films from high school film makers from all over the region—that would be like Sioux City, Omaha, Bellevue and the surrounding communities around here,” said White.

White said these students will experience how to promote their own work, and have other producers and film makers be able to analyze their film and work with them. It will also help students correctly critique a film, as well as understand what makes a great film.

“The Wildcat Spirit Film Festival is going to be an annual thing, its serves a lot of purposes,” said White. “One, it’s community engagement. Two, it’s really great for our students, and three, it is good recruiting because were able to challenge students to come to our program.”

White invites all students and faculty to attend the festival’s pre-party movie night in Humanities Room 408 at 8 p.m.tonight. He also invites anyone and everyone to the festival tomorrow.