Updated on March 4 at 2:00 p.m.
CHAMPAIGN — The deadline for the Pens to Lens Student Screenwriting and Filmmaking competition has been extended to March 9. K-12 students have until the end of the month to submit scripts that could be turned into a movie.
IPM’s Kimberly Schofield spoke with Andrew Stengele, one of the organizers of the competition with Champaign Movie Makers, about how the student submissions are brought to the big screen.
This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
STENGELE: Pens to Lens is a partnership between Champaign Movie Makers, 40 North, CUDO — the Champaign Urbana Design Organization — and the Champaign Park District. So it’s a lot of different groups coming together. It’s a youth screenwriting competition. So kids from as low as kindergarten all the way up to seniors in high school will write screenplays, and then over the summer, filmmakers from Champaign Movie Makers will turn them into short films and bring the kids out to set … or the writers, I guess. I don’t want to say kids because some of them are in high school. So the youth, we bring them out to set, get them involved in the production, maybe cast them in the movie, maybe give them a role in the crew, we have a red-carpet gala in August at the Virginia Theatre. August 16th is the date this year, and that’s when we premiere all the movies. Everybody dresses up, like it’s a red-carpet event. But we also do movie posters through CUDO. Everybody gets a poster for their movies and some of the movies that didn’t get chosen to be made into films also get posters. So we try to include as many of the kids as possible in the program itself.
SCHOFIELD: What is Pens to Lens’ goal in having this event or this competition?
STENGELE: The goal is to inspire kids to just start making things. Everybody can write. It doesn’t require any special equipment. It doesn’t require any advanced knowledge. You can just start writing a story right now. So that’s a very accessible thing for kids to do. Making a movie is less accessible, but we try to show that it is possible for them to do. When the kids write their story, then we invite them out to set to see exactly how we do it. And there’s another component to Pens to Lens, which is the student filmmaking competition portion, where we will also accept movies that the kids shot themselves, and we’ll show a selection of those at the red-carpet gala in August. To help with that, we sometimes do school visits to talk about how this is done, how it works. And we have a selection of equipment that we can loan out to students to make movies with on their own. But even if they just have a phone, they can make a movie if they want to. We want to show that you can make stuff where you’re at right now. You don’t have to have a degree in things. You don’t have to go out to LA or Chicago or New York or big cities. You can do it right here, right now, if you want to.
SCHOFIELD: If a student wants to be involved in the Pens to Lens competition, what do they have to do to submit a script?
STENGELE: If they just go to penstolens.com you can find the submission link there. We also have resources for students, parents, and teachers, how to format a script, various ways to insert it into curriculum. If you want to make it a class project or an extra credit project or something like that, tips and tricks. But also there’s contact information. So if you can’t find what you’re looking for, you can send a message to Pens to Lens and we will get you where you need to go.
SCHOFIELD: I’ve been in two Pens to Lens films, and the first one there was a whole green screen in the back. And I know that year there was also some sort of claymation type thing. Do the students have to have how they want it to be filmed in mind? Or is that what the Champaign Movie Makers take on?
STENGELE: Generally, the writer writes the story and the director interprets the story on how to tell it visually. But sometimes the kids have very specific camera directions that they write into the screenplays. We try to always film it as written. We don’t try to edit the screenplays or anything like that. This is what the kid wrote, this is what we’re gonna do. A lot of us filmmakers will read through all of them and somebody chooses one where like ‘Eh, that didn’t really do anything for me’. And then you see it on screen, and you go, ‘Oh, I see what they wanted!’ And that’s part of the fun of it too, is just … who’s going to choose what and how they’re going to do each one.
SCHOFIELD: How many scripts get submitted, and how many do you take for premiering at the gala?
STENGLE: How many we get varies year to year. In the heyday before COVID, we were getting 200+ screenplays, and so unfortunately, we couldn’t do all of them. So every year, we try to give out some awards to screenplays that everyone recognized was really good, but just nobody could make it work for whatever reason.
SCHOFIELD: Are there any specific guidelines or things that jump out to you all when you’re looking at the scripts?
STENGELE: No, we get a wide range of things. Sometimes you get a second grade script that’s full of wild imagination and impossible things, mythical creatures and different dimensions and stuff like that. And then other times you get very serious, emotional dramas. The point is not to limit the kids in any way. Write whatever you want to write. Write the movie that you want to see, and we’ll do our best to make it happen.
SCHOFIELD: If people want to be involved in the filmmaking, do they just have to reach out to Champaign Movie Makers?
STENGELE: Yes, if you want to be involved, you might not, on your first time around, be able to lead a project. But even if you’re not necessarily the director who’s leading a project…if you’re a sound person, you want to run sound, great. We need more of those. That’s the most important part of films and we don’t have enough of them. If you’re a camera person, you want to do lighting, you want to act….everybody should be involved. All the kids should be involved. All the community should be involved. Everyone should be involved.
Submissions for the Pens to Lens Screenplay Competition are due by 11:59pm on March 9.