This fall, juniors Riley Reid, Stuart Schrader and Jan Bergengruen entered the Campus MovieFest contest. Although it was their first competition, the group took home the award for best picture for “Of Princes.”
A month ago, Campus MovieFest invited them to apply to Cannes Film Festival in May. On Jan. 5, Uninsincerity received news that they had been accepted.
“We’re just really excited for the opportunity to be able to go,” Reid said. “I mean it’s just wild — we still are kind of like, ‘What did we do to get this?’ It’s one of the top film festivals, and we’re just two kids who wanted to make a film, you know?”
Schrader and Reid started working together more than a year ago when they discovered a shared interest in creating visuals and film. Initially, they were making videos for fun. But last January, Schrader invested in the high-end camera and lighting equipment necessary to continue at a professional level.
Under the title Strange Trip Media, the boys continued to do professionally what they had originally been doing on their own time — making shorts and documentary-style films. Their first paying job was creating the music video for Bazanji’s “Your Year,” followed by various ad and promotional videos for on-campus organizations.
Over the summer, Schrader started thinking about the company’s name. Too real to call themselves sincere, but with a complete refusal to produce anything resembling insincerity, Uninsincerity was born.
“If I was going to do something like this it needed to have that you-know-it-when-you-see-it, but hard-to-articulate quality of being authentic, so that’s what I went for,” Schrader said.
This was the first year that Campus MovieFest was hosted by the Carolina Film Association to hold a contest in which contestants were given high-quality equipment, software and a week to write, shoot and edit a short film. Running on a tight deadline and uploading the final product with literally minutes to spare, the team made their deadline.
