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APPROXIMATELY 50 FILMS ARE EXPECTED TO BE SUBMITTED FROM STUDENTS IN MISSOURI

FILM festival at Rose TheaterCREATEÂ 6 ARROW • week of Oct. 24 - 30, 2012 STUDENT MUSIC RECITAL

The 2012 Athenaeum Series will include a student recital event at 12:30 p.m. Oct. 31 at Sadie’s Place in Kent Library.+

Haunted downtown walking tour gives eerie history of Cape GirardeauBRITTANY TEDDER ARROW STAFF WRITER

Port Cape, the Sherwood-Minton House and Old Lorimier Cemetery are just a few places in Cape Girardeau that have an abundance of history and ghost stories.

The Haunted Downtown Tour is a walking tour that begins at the Boardman Pavilion across from Hutson’s Furniture on Main Street in downtown Cape Girardeau, travels along Spa-nish and Lorimier Streets to the River Campus and ends back at the pavilion.

Christy Mershon, the assistant director of the Office of Extended and Continuing Education at Southeast Missouri State University, and local photographer Tom Neumeyer are the tour guides.

Mershon said during the tour she and Neumeyer talk about and visit different buildings downtown along the corridor where Broussard’s, Buckner Brewery and Port Cape are located, depending on the time of night and how many people are in the buildings.

“Sometimes we go into some of the buildings, depending on how busy it is,” Mershon said. “We’ve gone into Port Cape, the River Campus and the Glenn House property, a historic house right down from the River Campus.”

Mershon said last year she heard some strange noi-ses at the Glenn House while she was talking to a group of

teenagers about the history of the building.“It was a 16th or 17th birthday party, and the kids and their

parents were with us,” Mershon said. “I was in the process of telling the history of the Glenn House, and we heard what sounded like either sobbing or laughter inside the house. The kids thought we staged somebody, but we definitely didn’t.”

Mershon said there have also been stories of strange happe-nings during construction of the River Campus.

“When we do the haunted tours, we hear a lot of people who say ‘I worked on that job site, and this happened,’” Mer-shon said. “It seemed to be a lot of things like tools being moved.”

According to Mershon, the Sherwood-Minton House on Washington Avenue is arguably the most haunted place in Cape Girardeau.

“It’s a house that is thought to be so haunted that in times that it’s been sold, the real-estate signs disclosed that the house has been said to be haunted to avoid any lawsuits,” Mershon said.

Joel P. Rhodes, a professor in the Department of His-tory, said one association of its haunting is the idea that the Sherwood-Minton House was a smallpox hospital during the Civil War. The legend is that the soldiers who died in the hos-pital were carried to the Old Lorimier Cemetery at night.

“Some of the ghosts’ stories that are associated with that involve bobbing lights over in the cemetery, which

apparently connects to taking the bodies out at night using lanterns or candles,” Rhodes said.

There is also folklore that there is a tunnel that connects the Sherwood-Minton House to the Old Lorimier Cemetery, Rhodes said. However, there never has never been any proof.

Mershon said that the alleged tunnel was used by the Union soldiers to take the dead bodies to the cemetery during the night because they did not want to show weak-ness or their forces thinning down.

“It’s thought that potentially more Civil War soldiers died in Cape Girardeau than at the Battle of Appomattox, not because of the battle but because smallpox was so bad,” Mershon said.

The tapping ghost is the most well-known story in Old Lorimier Cemetery, Mershon said.

“You’re in the cemetery looking around, and you feel a tap on your shoulder, you turn around and there’s nothing there,” Mershon said. “Not a lot of people said they saw things, just felt a tap.”

Mershon said people can bring flashlights and cameras, and they should dress appropriate for the weather and wear comfortable shoes to the tour.

The next scheduled tours are at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. Saturday and 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Sunday. Each tour lasts 90 minutes.

Contact the Office of Continuing Education at 573-986-6879 for reservations.

Fault-Line Film Festival accepts films from any Missouri college studentANDREA GILS COPY EDITOR

The Fault-Line Film Festival is a competition organized by the mass media department at Southeast Missouri State University for stu-dents to showcase their talents by putting together a story for film.

Dr. James Dufek, professor of mass media and TV and film operations manager, said this festival is not just for TV and film students.

“It’s for everybody because everyone has a story,” Dufek said.

Students from all disciplines can tell a story through comedy, drama, science fiction or animation.

Dufek said that students have the propen-sity to use profanity in every film they make.

“Last year the festival was for a mature audience because they were very expressive with their dialogue,” Dufek said. “This is not for kids. Some of the things are very simple and wouldn’t offend anybody, and some are trying to make a point by using their tools available.”

Dufek said that he does not want the audience to categorize the event as one where only profanity is shown.

“We don’t know what the product will be this year,” Dufek said. “You want them to be as open and expressive as they feel necessary.”

Students and faculty work together to organize and produce the event, including the Department of Mass Media, Department of Theatre & Dance, Earl and Margie Holland School of Visual and Performing Arts, College of Liberal Arts, Department of Indus-trial and Engineering Technology and the Douglas C. Greene Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Southeast.

According to Dufek, there is an artistic and creative background with all the developers and the judges. The seven or eight judges will select the winners and runners up accor-ding to a determined criteria, such as con-textual and storytelling techniques, compo-sition, sound bed, music, dialogue, acting and lighting.

Dufek said it is a combination of produc-tion and storytelling.

“We had a couple of submissions where the quality of the product is just beautiful, but there’s no story,” Dufek said. “Then we have some that the story is developing but the production quality is so bad we weren’t able to hear it, understand it.”

This is the third year of the festival but the second year that it is going statewide. Any student from a Missouri university is eligi-ble to participate in the festival. There were almost 50 entries last year and organizers hope to have more this year.

There is no limit to the number of stu-dents that can be involved in each film, but films can be only 10 minutes long. Last year there were some teams that had 20-30 stu-dents involved, while some groups had only four members.

Students who are not mass media majors are not allowed to use the department’s equipment becuase it is expensive and they need to teach students to use it. Students have used their own cameras and iPhones and edited on their laptops.

“It’s been proven now that you don’t need the highest end, high-end digital HD stuff to do a good story,” Dufek said. “It would be wonderful to have a shot in HD and better lighting, but the fact that the story was told was moving, did its job, you look past some of the production elements that could have been better because they did a good job with what they had.”

Associate professor Fred Jones and Dufek worked with the advertising and public rela-tions students to build a plan. But when they had a marketing and development plan, they had no way to fund it nor resources to pro-mote it.

According to Dufek, this is where James Stapleton from the Center of Innovation and Entrepreneurship came in. Dufek said Sta-pleton wanted to include the mass media in the center’s Global Entrepreneurship Week.

“This wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for the Center for Innovation and Entrepre-neurship,” Dufek said.

TV and film graduate Robert Speurlock developed the logo while he was a student at Southeast.

“We wanted to tie in the earthquake fault-line with the festival,” Dufek said. “If you are from this area we are sitting in a pretty intense fault line that could erupt in any time so we just tied in with the FFF.”

The Fault-Line Film Festival Group was formed to combine different talents and share resources, abilities and skills to make the festival possible. The group also helps with the marketing, set up, screening and other manual labor activities.

The festival features a guest speaker each year. Steven Poster, 2002-2003 president of the American Society of Cinematogra-phers in Hollywood, was one of the featu-red speakers Southeast brought to talk about light shooting in the masters class during the award winners ceremony last year.

This year’s speaker will be David Johnson, president and partner of Coolfire Media and board member at Cinema St. Louis. Cool-fire Media is a St. Louis company that pro-duces commercials and a reality show called “Sweetie Pie’s” on the Oprah Winfrey Network.

The award ceremony will take place on Wednesday, Nov. 14, at the Donald C. Bedell Performance Hall. There will be $4,000 in awards and prizes. Each team will get a crys-tal trophy if they win an award.

The awards include: Best in Show and a certificate to runners up, the Judges Award, and an Audience Choice Award. This award will be determined by tallying ballots han-ded out at the two-hour screening of the winners and other entries during a screening open to students at 7 p.m. on Nov. 16. at Rose Theatre. There also will be a screening open to the community on Saturday, Nov. 17.

Dufek said he hopes students understand the script to screen process.

“Putting that on their lap, giving it to them and saying produce this, with no support, no help, having to coordinate their production and talent schedules, post-production, plan their script, book locations, compose shots in a single camera style, are among the seve-ral things students need to take into account while shooting a film,” Dufek said.

In order to collect funds, there will be T-shirts sold at $12-15, and the Saturday screening will cost $5 to attend.

“We want to have a donation attached to it to help offset costs in the future,” Dufek said.

There is no profit made with any of the selling. The money collected goes right back into the festival to help fund the event.

The committee’s long-term goal is to make the festival nationally recognized.

“We want this to be able to grow and stu-dents to get exposure to go to the next level, to independent film-making,” Dufek said. “We hope to go national.”

Students celebrate after the announcement of the Audience’s Choice award winner last year. Photo by Hunter Hempen