The annual Media Showcase — a chance for film production students to showcase the projects they have spent the semester working on — will take place April 20 at 7:30 p.m. in the Covenant Fine Arts Center. After showing on campus, some of the films may go on to appear at independent film festivals.

The Michigan chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (colloquially known as the Student Emmys) announced last week that they would nominate many Calvin student projects. Professor Geert Heetebrij said that this is the first time in Calvin history that all narrative short films from Calvin’s advanced production class (COMM351) were nominated. On top of that, “Five films from last year are currently receiving attention in the wider world,” film professor Samuel Smartt told Chimes. “Two student documentaries from the fall are playing at the Freep film festival in Detroit later this month.”

Movies created by students in every level of the film production classes will be shown at the event, including three movies from COMM351. These three movies from the advanced class were months in the making. Adrian Van Stee, a senior studying film and media, said that the film projects got started in a screenwriting class last semester. Then when the COMM351 class started they voted on which three scripts to produce.

According to Van Stee, the first couple weeks of the course were used for pre-production work — finding actors and film locations — that had to happen before the production teams could move onto the actual production phase. George Reynolds, a film and media major and the director of “In Between the Lines” (one of the films) told Chimes that the actual filming took place over an “intense” three-day, back-to-back shoot. The majority of the remaining time was then spent working on post-production editing.

According to Reynolds, though, the amount of time spent on a movie does not guarantee satisfaction on the artist’s end. He wrote and directed “In Between the Lines,” a story exploring his personal experience with separated and politically opposed parents in a fictional setting because he “didn’t want to write anybody else’s story,” Reynolds told Chimes. “I wanted to write my own.” However, “the production has come with a lot of disappointment,” Reynolds said, especially when compared to the experience creating a different film on his own last semester, which “ended up being as successful as I wanted it to be.”

With this project, he was not able to achieve the same scope of creative fulfillment. “I wanted a good film out of it, but I don’t think I got that, but that has to be okay because it happens and you have to learn something from it,” Reynolds said.

Van Stee had a very different experience with his movie “Hearth,” which follows the story of a dating site owner who pretends to be a normal user to set up the perfect date. “It is not super deep, I’m not trying to change the world or anything. It’s fun and I hope that people are able to connect with the characters,” Van Stee told Chimes.

Production brought expected challenges, like locating a set, constantly editing the same footage and feeling dissatisfied, like Reynolds. “It is hard to be completely happy with anything I have made,” Van Stee told Chimes, “but in terms of production, it went as smoothly as it could have.”

Both Van Stee and Reynolds noted the importance of entire teams working on the films. “There are so many people who this would not have been possible without, and it is so much better with the ideas that they contributed,” Van Stee said.

For Van Stee, the Media Showcase is “fun” because of “get[ting] to see the projects of people you know up on the big screen and support[ing] them.”