Ira High School students participating in UIL film contest

Ira High School’s audio-visual classes are getting ready to finish their projects for this year’s University Interscholastic League (UIL) film contest.
Ira ISD students enter film contests all over the state and nation, and they frequently win cash prizes to help them advance their technology and video production. 
In fact, teacher Walt Burt said that they had already won several thousand dollars this year in the Workforce Solutions of West Central Texas’ student video contest. 
He said students produce over 20 videos per year, but many of them are individual works.
Burt said Ira prepared entries for two of the UIL contest categories: Documentary and narrative. 
The other categories were computer/digital animation and traditional animation. 
“It’s a lot of competition,” Burt said. “Last year there were 1,700 films statewide.”
He said that the UIL divided districts into two divisions based on their size. Division 1 was 1A-4A, and Division 2 was 5A and 6A, so Ira will compete against much larger schools.
Burt said that a big factor in whether a film advances is access to proper equipment, which can be an advantage for larger schools. That could be one reason there have been no 1A schools qualify for state.
“We have limited equipment, but we tend to win a lot of contests,” he said. 
Burt said that this year’s documentary entry is a continuation of a film the students created last year. The original film was about an Ugandan orphanage called Hope for AIDS Orphans and its director, Daniel Mwebaza. It showed how he struggled to provide for the orphans he took in.
“It really touched the kids,” Burt said. 
“They were carrying water out of a ditch like a mile back to the orphanage. They didn’t have safe water. There was one of them that had gotten elephantiasis because of parasites from drinking bad water.”
That film raised several thousand dollars for the orphanage to build a new facility. 
“The film made a huge difference,” Burt said. “It helped people from the weakest amongst us.”
However, the first film did not advance out of the first round. 
Burt said that this year’s documentary entry is about how Christians in film are discriminated against. It recaps last year’s entry and calls attention to the reasons the students believe it did not advance, namely the fact that the orphanage is a Christian institution and the voiceover included an excerpt from the Bible. This entry has already been submitted to the UIL for judging and is posted on Burt’s YouTube account.
The second entry is a horror film about bullying set in their old school building. In this film, a group of students trick an outcast girl into going to the old school building to play hide-and-seek, then take her phone and lock her in an old walk-in freezer before going on to play their game as planned. At that point, the girl turns into her alter-ego, Shadow, and picks off her bullies one by one, turning them into shadow beings like herself.
“It was a blast making the horror movie,” Burt said. “It really was.”
The class is putting the final touches on that entry before Wednesday’s deadline. Results will be announced in February.