I chose the most antisocial spot in the back corner of USC’s Ray Stark Family Theatre to gauge the audience for the university’s first-ever science film competition.

My estimate of the crowd was, roughly: half cinema, half science students — mainly due to the balance of eyeglasses that were, and weren’t, meant to be stylish. One filmgoer sat with his sticker-covered cello case. The theater was abuzz with a quirky, intelligent glow.

In the lobby before the screening, I met a group of USC students live-blogging and covering the event for CelebritySC. I hadn’t planned to cover it for Square Syndrome, but suddenly, I felt like giving myself a press pass. Scientific American’s Carin Bondar published a sharp preview story in October.

More than 130 students from many disciplines collaborated on the films.

Cinephiles met engineers. Producers mingled with chemists. Dreamers and innovators were one in the same.

Eight films were selected for the final round by ten judges (USC faculty and indie filmmakers). Criteria used to rank the films included categories like: scientific content, authenticity of science, overall concept, etc.

WINNERS:

1st Place ($2,500) – “Time”

Cooking and everyday kitchen items are combined with stop-motion animation and a clever script about the passage of time made for the clear #1 choice! The authors, Kevin Le (mathematics, physics & astronomy) and Edward Saavedra (cinema, production, editing), piqued our interest by asking: Why does time move in only one direction? They flip pancakes, build sandwiches and make a total mess to teach us about the concept of entropy (read: chaos). I was enthralled for every moment and was delighted to see them win. Learning and enjoyment were one. I hope they put it online. (If you guys are reading this, post a link in comments!)

2nd Place ($1,500) – “It’s A(Au)ll in You”

A hillbilly prospector is fruitlessly panning for gold. He is interrupted by a mysterious voice who guides him through the periodic table to show him how long it takes Sun (or any star) to make gold, a heavy element. The narrative and concept were memorable — very catchy and cute. However, the film could have integrated the teaching moments with the storyline better. It seemed to flip back and forth between cute cartoon story and VO step-by-step instruction over a pulsing “slide” of the sun. It must be noted that weaving creative storytelling with hard science into a cohesive product is a very difficult task — kudos and congratulations to the students for their great work.

3rd Place ($500) – “Superluminal Neutrinos in 5 Minutes”

Perhaps my favorite subject in this competition (aside from one about particle accelerators), this film was jam-packed with information. It really did feel like the filmmakers were rushing to tell as much about superluminal neutrinos in 5 minutes as humanly possible. The animation style was delightfully crude and hand-drawn — unfolding on the screen as we watched. I have a basic layperson’s knowledge of neutrinos, however, I felt a bit bombarded with the steady pulse of fast, nonstop narration. Maybe that was the point, because yeah, these concepts can get pretty dense — Or NOT, as they posed the titillating question: If neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light, do they have negative mass? What is negative mass? Does this totally fuck up special relativity? (Profanity added here for emphasis.)

A few other films received special mentions, including one that applied Newton’s Laws to dance and another that used stochastically self-similar non-Euclidian replication as an animation technique. Phew. That last one also received a special award for best animation — hear, hear.

My personal honorable mention goes to “The Expense of Spirit” for the heartbreaking narrative: a scientist torn between her evolutionary research and her Christian faith. They acting came from the heart. My guess is that the judges realized that the actual evolutionary research itself (and its critical applications) were far ignored, compared with the story. I felt for the characters, but I needed to feel for that überimportant research, too.

It’s not easy making these films, and I wish I would have been a participant. When I heard the call for proposals, I had just completed a short mathematics-themed film and was not able to ramp up the momentum to get a new one going for the contest’s open submission period (they didn’t accept previously produced films).

After all was said and done, the event’s host, Clifford V. Johnson (USC professor of physics and astronomy) said it best:

“If we get [science] out there so it’s not this special thing in a corner, we’re not really in democracy, fully. Because we’re not sharing ideas. A real citizen is someone just as comfortable talking about things in popular culture as they are talking about things happening in science.”

Long live the USC Science Film Competition! And anyone trying to make difficult concepts fun and creative.