Student Film Festival
Click here for more information about the film festival and to submit a Film!
Invited speaker for film festival
Cyrus Nozomu Sethna
Actor, director, translator
A bilingual / bicultural product, Cyrus was born and raised in Japan, mastering both English and Japanese. Following his graduation from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota with a major in acting and communications, Cyrus honed his skills as a stage, TV, and voice actor in the US before returning to Japan. In addition to his work as a bilingual performer, he has written, produced, and directed three short films, the first of which was officially screened at the world-renowned Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia, and the next two which were officially screened at the Sapporo International Short Film Festival.
Now’s the Best Time to be a Filmmaker
With incredible advances in digital filmmaking and editing technology that have been made over the past 25 years, filmmaking, a profession or hobby once relegated to the incredibly talented or the incredibly rich, has become a skill that anyone can develop with consumer-grade equipment. Furthermore, thanks to free online tutorials on streaming platforms such as YouTube, you don’t even have to go to film school to learn the basics of filming and editing. Of course, with great access comes great competition. In a world where the availability of content is increasing and attention spans are decreasing exponentially, it’s individualism, ideas and resourcefulness, not state-of-the-art technology, that will win attention and recognition at the end of the day. My presentation will cover a brief history of digital filmmaking, how I learned to make films through a combination of talking to professionals and good old-fashioned trial-and-error, and the painful but necessary process of submitting the finished product to film festivals, which has also become a far easier and cheaper process than it used to be.
A clip of me directing an NHK English animation series for kids. While the studio engineer is Japanese, the cast are all native English speakers, which means I go back and forth in 2 languages over the course of a 9-hr. work day. It’s a lot of fun, but it also requires a meticulous attention to detail. Always a good stretch for the brain.
