One Minute Film Festival takes a turn to the scary side

The Center for Creativity’s One Minute Film Festival is back for a second year, adding a scary premise — “Bite-Sized Horror.”

Anyone in the Pitt community — faculty, staff and students at all campuses — with an idea and a smartphone or digital camera can participate. The only requirement is it must be just one minute, excluding credits.

This year, the Center for Creativity has teamed up with with Horror Studies in the University Library System and the Horror Studies Working Group to present the festival.

The center and the University Library System will present a Bite-Sized Horror Virtual Panel at 8 p.m. Oct. 12. Lisa Kröger, author curator of “13 Minutes of Horror,” a festival of mini-horror movies, and filmmakers Megan Llewellyn (“Tailypo”) and Eunice Levis (“Fell Ends”) will discuss the genre, moderated by Adam Charles Hart, author (“Monstrous Forms”) and Pitt Archives and Special Collections Visiting Researcher. Register here.

The festival is open to all forms of expression through the moving image — “unnerving narrative shorts, scary stop motion, eerie experimental films, and anything else you come up with,” according to the Center for Creativity.

Films will be accepted until 11:59 p.m. Oct. 24. Please complete and upload your submission using the Qualtrics form. You may submit up to three entries, but each entry must be sent separately. Submit your film.

Prizes will be awarded in the following categories:

  • Best Use of a Pitt Campus (Oakland or regional): $150

  • Best Monster, Killer, or Creature: $150

  • Best Incorporation of Social Awareness: $150

  • Best Picture: $250

Submissions will be shown at a virtual screening the night of Oct. 28, and will also be shown continuously on Hillman Library's digital wall (third floor) from 2 to 5 p.m. Oct. 29.