Wayne State College will be holding its second annual Wildcat Spirit Short Film Festival next Monday and Tuesday. Both college and high school students will have their independent films debuted at the showing. This year assistant communication arts professor Dr. Michael White chose three films to help students bring to the screen with one of them being the psychological thriller “Althea.”

“There were 17 scripts submitted,” White said. “I choose two scripts every summer. We chose three this time because two of the films were small projects.”

White said the first time he laid hands on “Althea” was about this time last year.

“. . . through the summer we started to pick up production crew, the original producer was Emmalee Scheibe, who couldn’t do it, then we held interviews for producers and then we ultimately chose Andrew Suiter who has been phenomenal. He rallied and created something really cool, I’m so excited for the final project,” White said.

“Althea” has been in production since last spring and has gone through many different hands to get to its final stage. The film was a collaboration of many different WSC classes that worked together to create this final piece.

“The film originated out of professor Brian Begley’s playwrighting and screen writing class last spring,” WSC professor Dr. Jeanne Tiehen said. “The TV Performance class is a large class, so not everyone in the class was cast in the film. Everyone had to audition for a role, and a few of the students were selected. Some of the students are also currently working on the production side of the film.”

The entirety of the film has been created by students—whether it be the costumes, the set, the script, etc. “Althea” will also be presented by students; the students have deadlines that must be met for them to stay on schedule and not fall behind in the creation process.

“When looking for my actors the number one thing I looked for with my main four characters was the believability of them being together and their chemistry,” said “Althea” producer Andrew Suiter. “We had little to no struggles while filming, but if I had to pick one, I would say the snow caused trouble while filming the outside scenes.”

The film festival will hold many different workshops and activities for people to participate in. The two-day festival will last from April 1 to April 2 with different events on both days. White created the film festival last year to help both new and old filmmakers.

“We have workshops with professionals on day one and screenings with professionals,” White said. “Then what we’ll do is we have high school workshops where we take high school filmmakers and put them on set, and they can shoot with our students, so they get to work that day, and we offer acting workshops, writing workshops, and all kinds of workshops for filmmakers. On the second night are the premieres and awards.”

White said that he is always waiting for students to come and impress him with their work at the festival.

“The most important thing is to be able to hustle and to work hard and not accept being average,” White said. “If you look at the students in my program I am constantly begging to be impressed and we’re seeing better and better-quality filmmakers coming to Wayne every year.”