Comedy short film ‘Hold It’ advances to Campus MovieFest finale

The most antagonistic place on campus for Rafe Blood was an elevator in Melnitz Hall. He said these feelings inspired his short film “Hold It,” one of the Jury Award winners of this year’s Campus MovieFest.

“I feel like all the elevators on campus are pretty janky … and the one in the film building is very strange,” said Blood, a fourth-year film student and the director and writer of “Hold It.”

“Hold It” follows the love-struck Miles as he tries to hold an elevator for Mindy, the object of his affections. Blood said Miles holds the elevator for Mindy against all odds, showing the lengths someone will go for the people they love.

Campus MovieFest is the world’s largest student film festival, where filmmakers create five-minute films in one week with the option to use equipment, tools and training provided by Campus MovieFest. As a campus finalist and Jury Award winner, “Hold It” will compete against hundreds of other winners from campuses across the country at Campus MovieFest’s Hollywood finale in June.

“CMF is really cool because of the time limit,” said Emma Wisdom, a fourth-year film student who portrays Mindy in “Hold It.” “You don’t get caught up in the perfection of moviemaking, so it allows you to be more lighthearted and it really gets you back to the fun of making movies.”

Blood said he also found the fast-paced time limit refreshing compared with the slow, rewarding process of finishing his thesis project for UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television. Instead of spending months casting “Hold It,” Blood had to rely on himself as the lead actor for the project, in addition to functioning as the director and screenwriter, in order to put the film together as quickly as possible.

“It reminded me of how I used to (shoot films) when I was 14, when I first started falling in love with movies,” Blood said. “I only had access to what was right in front of me and a lot of the time that was just me. It was nostalgic because of that.”

Filming in an elevator provided its own challenges for Blood and his team, who encountered continually closing doors and students who needed to use the elevator.

“I felt like we were on ‘Jaws’ where the shark just wouldn’t work,” Blood said. “The elevator just wouldn’t work.”

Blood said his easygoing attitude toward his entry for Campus MovieFest was also helped by his confusion about the nature of the competition. In fact, Blood said he had no idea that Campus MovieFest was a competition at all until after he had already submitted his film.

Blood said he made his movie thinking that Campus MovieFest was just a fun opportunity to see everyone’s films, until he turned in the movie and was told that only the top 16 films are shown.

“It was just instant panic,” Blood said. “At that point, it was done and it was turned in, and I was just like ‘OK, let’s see what happens.’”

Although the comedy ultimately won the Jury Award and Blood received a Campus MovieFest Golden Tripod Award nomination for best actor, Blood said the film’s success came as a surprise to him because he was unsure if the film would even be shown.

“Rafe is really active as a director, so we’re constantly shooting little projects and we treat each one with the work it needs, but we’re never going to live or die by which one makes it,” said Noel Chalmers, a fourth-year film student and an actor and sound mixer for “Hold It.”

Blood said the film’s success felt like a happy accident, as his goal in entering the competition was to be among other creative people at UCLA and see what stories they had to tell.

“There are great filmmakers at this campus,” Blood said. “For me, Campus MovieFest was more about having the experience of working with my friends on something fun in a really compressed amount of time among a huge context of other creative minds on campus that I typically wouldn’t have access to.”