The works were no more than a few minutes long each, but each had something to say and accomplished its goal in its own way, with varying degrees of technical difficulty to establish the proper atmosphere.

One of my favorites, “Blocks,” by Deven Langston of VCU, opened with simple black squares fading in and out over a white background to the slow beat of a guitar, but as the song accelerated into the main upbeat section, the camera pulled back to reveal a long repeating pattern of these boxes, and then it switched unexpectedly to three dimensions and treated the audience to a full playroom of boxes jumping and spinning and exploding in rhythm to the music.

In sharp contrast to what was needed to build that piece, “The Gift Card” by Aaron Pinkston of U of Illinois, told a simple and quirky story of one student’s unexpected present from his father. It was an expired debit/credit card, and due to the inhibitive technicalities of the company’s policies and his long trek through them, he could not get it reactivated. He told the story himself with pictures and video of the stages of his story piling up on the screen.

“Wicked,” by Katy Warner of CCA, was a fast-paced rock video with a semi-epileptic pattern flashing in the background while pictures of what each word in the song sounded like flashed on as quickly as the singer screamed his chorus.

The subjects were not all flighty and fun to watch. In “War Piece,” by James Hardgrave of VCU, multiple front-line clips from the Iraq War were spliced together, every second shocking in its immediacy and bloody reality. No anti-Bush or anti-war lines were needed on screen; the still frames of dead men with only half a face were a message by themselves.

Many of those entries which discussed “risky” topics revealed a fearless creator. RPI undergraduate Laura Kaplan ’07 entered a six-minute reflective monologue on the role death played in her life, titled “Sitting Still.” It was dedicated to the numerous close friends she has lost over the course of her life, one even to the Virginia Tech shootings during her time working on the piece.

The other RPI entry, “Oxygen and Water,” by Jordan Quellman ’08, was a wordless attack on the unnecessary diversity of choice that comes with capitalism. It featured scenes of endless items on shelves, accelerating with the music into a loud and never-ending loop of all the things you can buy. At that point, the music and the fast-paced loop stopped, and you just saw the author taking a glass, pouring some water in it, and drinking it with a happy sigh of relief. It was a sarcastic, rebellious ending to the previous high-velocity bits of film and music.