Matt Gentry | The Roanoke Times

Ben Hannam, a professor of visual communication and design at Virginia Tech, created the Four Minute Film Festival, where teams of three will have 24 hours to make a four-minute film. Behind Hannam is an event poster.

Want to see the work?

Four Minute Film Festival Premiere

• When: 6 p.m. Saturday
• Where: Hancock Hall, Virginia Tech
• Information: fourminutefilmfest.com

From 4 p.m. Friday to 4 p.m. Saturday, a clock will be ticking on Virginia Tech's Four Minute Film Festival Web site. Bleary-eyed film fanatics in teams of three may be forced to pull an all-nighter as they scurry around town staging, shooting and editing their own four-minute videos.

The topic of those videos is to be announced at 4 p.m. Friday, giving teams no time for premeditation. Outside actors are allowed, but only the three team members are allowed to shoot and edit the film. Eleven video stations in the New Media Center at Virginia Tech will be available from midnight to 4 p.m. Saturday, though it's up to team members to find camera equipment.

The videos must be delivered by 4 p.m. Saturday to Hancock Hall, where they'll be shown at a public film premiere two hours later. The audience will vote by ballot, and the top four videos will win prizes.

Although the competition may sound cutthroat, as Hollywood can be, it's really about having fun, event planner Ben Hannam said.

"The idea is not so much to produce the best film but to have fun with friends and enjoy the medium," he said.

Hannam, an interactive design professor, is working with Tech's art and art history department to put on the event. He said he got the idea when attending a conference in Germany several years ago.

"They put on a kind of similar film festival, and I thought that something like this would be a lot of fun in Blacksburg and give us a chance to meet a lot of our university and community neighbors," Hannam said.

As of Tuesday, 19 teams had signed up -- a mix of high school students, college students and professionals. Some are local and others are traveling several hours to participate.

David Gladson, Nina Camoriano and Amrita Raja are Tech students who live in Main Campbell Hall and are part of the honors community there. According to Gladson, the group has already worked on a video series about their dorm and posted it on YouTube.

"The idea was to make a live-action Web comic, something short that is geared toward college students," Gladson wrote in an e-mail. "So far, we have done five shorts, as well as a mocumentary about an annual MC event: the joust. All the videos are done in a very sarcastic style and don't take themselves seriously. We are also planning on doing more serious videos to help promote the community."

Gladson said if his team wins the festival its members plan to donate their earnings to the honors community, which would devote the funds to a community project.

The team with the most audience votes will win $250 per person, and second place wins $125 per person. The third place team wins $150 in Mish Mish gift certificates, and fourth place wins three medium-format Holga cameras.

Those who attend the film premiere Saturday night have a chance to win door prizes. Members of the Virginia Tech chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts will be selling $10 T-shirts to mark the event, said AIGA co-president Jessica Harllee, and festival participants will receive a discount.