SLO Film Fest to spotlight Cal Poly talent with Short Cuts screening Monday
As a part of the 2025 San Luis Obispo International Film Festival, six Cal Poly student films will hit the big screen in one of the festival’s largest screenings –– Cal Poly Short Cuts.
The premiere highlights the creative process of student filmmakers under the mentorship of Cal Poly lecturer Randi Barros and Media Arts professor James Warner. A short produced by the Mustang Film Society, a campus club geared towards film, will also be included.
“In a lot of classes, the class starts and students are all in their little individual worlds on their phones or looking at their laptops,” Barros said. “But with these classes, you get there and everybody’s buzzing. They’re talking, and they’re making really great connections.”
During the six-week process, students in Barros’s Cinematic Process course pitch a script to not only their classmates, but those in Warner’s Digital Video course who cover the technical side of film production. They use a ranked voting system to choose which scripts to produce and assign the groups that are going to make each story come to life.
From sticky note romance to broken marriages and familial grief, many of the films explore personal experiences in a way that can be universally understood.
“People get to see what Cal Poly students are thinking about, what they’re doing, what they’re creating and what’s important to them,” Barros said. “I think that’s fantastic.”
Communications junior Vanessa Ulloa produced “Interception” and worked as a script supervisor for Mustang Film Society’s “Sticky,” saying that the experience utilized Learn-By-Doing in every single aspect.
“I worked with real actors, I learned what it takes to make a film like a business and lead a team, a crew,” Ulloa said. “Every little detail mattered.”
From start to finish, Short Cuts engages with the local San Luis Obispo community and gives students a real-life glimpse into the world of film.
The course holds a casting call where actors from all over the community come to audition, recruiting from local theater troops, acting classes and even Facebook pages. The shorts star actors from various ages, backgrounds and experience levels and create connections beyond the classroom.
Aside from production, students work in “festival teams” where they promote their films entirely independently, from designing the advertisements to communicating with the news.
The moments that stuck out most to the students, however, were the moments where all their hard work started to come together. During a late night shoot, Ulloa watched as the main characters, Steph and Vera, wrapped one of the final, emotional scenes in “Interception.”
“I thought, wow, this is something that is powerful,” Ulloa said. “You felt that magic behind the process.”
The films created by the students not only teach them about the production process, but about community engagement and collaboration.
“I hope that they learn to listen better, to be confident about their own ideas and their own voice,” Barros said. “I hope that they keep up with the friendships and the relationships that they make in the class, and I hope they continue to create, whether it’s more films or to apply that creativity to whatever career they decide to go to.”
With student tickets starting at just five dollars, the films will air at 7:00 P.M. at the Fremont Theater on Monday, April 28.
The Shorts:
The following descriptions are directly credited to the SLO Film Fest website and student creators.
INTERCEPT
An aspiring 20-year-old fashion designer stuck in a dead-end job spars with her difficult manager, but after intervening in an accident involving the manager’s son, their relationship shifts in an unexpected way.
GOAT CREEK
An eclectic older woman returns home to scatter the ashes of her younger sibling, hoping to reconnect with her only living sister, who wants nothing to do with her.
STUCK
A young woman, haunted by her parents’ broken marriage finds herself reliving her past through her relationships, leaving her stuck in a cycle of destruction and heartbreak.
OPERATION LOST PUP
An overwhelmed mother makes the difficult decision to sell the family dog, but fails to inform her young imaginative daughter of the exchange which ignites a madcap adventure.
LIFE ON THE LINE
A man speaks on the phone with a customer service representative in an attempt to cancel his subscription to life.
STICKY
A hopeless romantic starts a relationship through the exchange of sticky notes on a public bus.
