They lift your spirits, prompt you to think, make you feel grateful and inspire you to do more. They connect you to our community, shining a spotlight on what's good about our city. They're stories that are Uniquely Milwaukee.
The Milwaukee Film Festival is back.
The annual event has always been a place to see movies from a variety of filmmakers, including local talent from here in southeastern Wisconsin. One of the groups getting their own spotlight: the area’s youth filmmakers.
As part of the “Rated K: For Kids” program, the Milwaukee Youth Show features eight short films made by the city’s next-generation creatives. They take center stage at 10:45 a.m. Saturday, April 25, at the Downer Theatre.
“This year, we’ve got a LEGO stop-motion film to full live action — what feels like blockbusters to documentaries about local businesses that are in trouble,” shared Ian Cessna, lead programmer for “Rated K.” She added, “ What unites all these films is the diversity of all the stories and … that they're made by a kid in Milwaukee.”
The LEGO stop-motion entry called Facade was written, directed, animated and edited by Sam Slowik, a junior at Brookfield Central High School who takes photo and video production classes at Waukesha County Technical College.
Asked about the message behind his short film, Slowik said it centers on “this LEGO guy, he realizes that he should be happy with his own face and he shouldn't have to cover his emotions to be happy.”
The plastic bricks and minifigures we’re all familiar with are in almost every one of Sam’s films, which build a visually compelling world through stop-motion animation. He learned the technique in elementary school and has worked hard on improving — a must considering the difficulty of the medium. “It's a tedious process,” he admitted. “All animation is, but this one is specifically hard.”
Another young director, Joseph Tzougros, found his spark for visual storytelling at an early age. Like Sam, he began with animation but quickly realized that path wasn’t for him.
“When I was a kid, I wanted to be an animator,” he recalled. “And then at some point I realized I was terrible at animation, so I went and grabbed a camera and recorded things around the place and just started making films.”
Eventually, Tzougros attended Kettle Moraine School for Arts and Performance to hone his craft. He’s currently a freshman at DePaul University in Chicago studying film and television with a concentration in editing.
His film GRAVEDIGGER — which he co-directed with high school classmates Anika and Zoe Oakland — involves ghosts, people dying in strange ways and family legacy. But it’s not as heavy as it sounds. “GRAVEDIGGER itself is just a comedic piece about family in some sense, but also just like friends and being with people.”
Tzougros is also acting in two of the comedy shorts in the program, an interest that stemmed from his connection to theater and further embeds him in a genre that’s always been his first choice. “I’d rather make people happy than sad,” he said. “Some people call me Monty Python because of the films I made in the past … because they were just so weird and bizarre.”
This isn’t the first film festival for either of them. Slowik has earned 16 awards and selections, and Tzougros was a part of this showcase at past Milwaukee Film Festivals and the Watertown Film Festival. They both encourage other kids to give filmmaking a shot, even if it takes a lot of patience.
“Genuinely, I would just say to create,” Tzougros said. “The biggest thing about film is it doesn't need to be good when you first start. I think the biggest thing is just creating and learning from what you've done.”
Slowik had a similar recommendation about young filmmakers being patient — especially those who get into stop-motion animation, which is a constant learning process. “It's not for everybody, first of all, because it takes a lot of patience and it can be frustrating at times,” he said. “But if you really, really enjoy it, I would suggest taking your time to learn it.
“If you do it wrong, it might not look the best. But once you get the hang of it, it brings these inanimate objects to life, and it's very cool. So I would suggest for everyone to try it at first. And if you don't like it, there's plenty of other forms of animation to learn.”
