Last Friday, May 30, Los Altos High School’s Film Analysis students posed on a red carpet outside of the Eagle Theater, dressed in formal attire and toasting to their successes with sparkling cider to kick off this year’s annual Film Festival.

The annual Film Festival is an opportunity for Film Analysis students to showcase their senior projects to the school, with ten of the best student films — as voted by the Film Analysis classes — being screened at the event. The previous Monday, May 19, classes throughout the day had the opportunity to attend all short film showings in the Eagle Theater.

Four awards are presented at the festival: Best Animated Film, Best Film, Best Editing and Best Screenplay. An additional fifth award for Best Cinematography was added this year, announced by the four judges during the festival as a last-minute addition.

Ranging from horrors to coming-of-age flicks, the top ten films this year are as follows: “The Interview,” “Due Now,” “Weeping Willow,” “Unhinged,” “Uptown Avenue,” “Forget Me Not,” “Third Wheel Society,” “Birthday for Marigold,” “Playback” and “Who Stole My Lasagna.” Three of the ten films were animated, and five additional runners-up were played during a brief intermission.

Film Analysis is an alternative to the senior year English requirement, and the end-of-year senior project consists of producing a film in addition to a genre-analysis visual essay. The process of producing the films was very rigorous for students, Film Analysis teacher Susana Herrera said, with the project starting at the very beginning of the second semester.

“For one minute of film on screen, you’re talking about at least ten [hours of work],” Herrera said.

Students in small groups created storyboards and scripts, reached out to friends or classmates to act in the films and screened rough drafts of their films to their peers during class time to get feedback — hours upon hours of work culminating in the final showcase.

“Blood, sweat and tears go into these [films],” Herrera said.

Students faced a myriad of challenges throughout the filmmaking process, Herrera said, including scheduling conflicts and needing to reshoot footage without enough time to do so. Despite this, students worked around issues and even stepped up as actors for other films, leaving Herrera impressed by the final products’ quality and success on screen.

“It was fun to see a horror film actually scaring people,” Herrera said. “And it was fun to see dialogue that, on the page, didn’t seem funny to me, … and then when you see it on screen, it’s hilarious.”

While many students shot live-action films, a few groups created animated projects, including seniors SJ Ly, Rishi Pandrala and Ankhil Enkhbayar, the three Film Analysis students who created “Uptown Avenue”, a noir-esque animated film driven by a detective storyline. “Uptown Avenue” won the award for Best Animated Film.

Being entirely animated, the process of creating the film was especially time-intensive, Ly said, with the group working tirelessly to finish the project in time for the festival. Despite the difficulty of their task, Ly said the work paid off, and she and her group were excited to get the chance to show off their hard work.

“It’s [the film] kind of like a baby to us,” Ly said. “We spent so much time on it.”

The film “Playback,” created by Film student seniors Em Tornero, Alejandro Chavez and Kelsey Nguyen, is a coming-of-age film starring a boy and his relationship with his absent father, sending a heartfelt message of cherishing the time one has with others. The film won two awards — Best Screenplay and Best Film — to the surprise and excitement of both Tornero and Chavez.

“I was [in] disbelief,” Tornero said. “I wanted to believe it would happen, but I was like ‘No, it might not.’”

The remaining awards were received by “The Interview” for Best Editing and “Third Wheel Society” for Best Cinematography.

Trisha Bhattacharyya, an actor in the film “Weeping Willow,” said that, as a queer person, she was excited to help “Weeping Willow” to create queer representation. In addition, she felt that the experience of watching films as well as working on one allowed her to help tell and empathize with others’ stories.

“In our current world, and also as students, we need to have a way to … speak with our voices,” Bhattacharyya said. “A huge way of [doing] that is putting [out] our own media.”

Bhattacharyya felt that, as a whole, the student films created a vital outlet for students to convey messages that are important to them, a sentiment shared by Herrera.

“[Filmmaking] is a powerful tool,” Herrera said. “Everybody should have a film project in their [time in] high school.”