It's Open Mic Night meets Apollo Theater meets YouTube. You bring in a tape or a DVD, and then we all watch it together on the big screen. The concept is simple: we will show anything you bring with you. Anything at all. That's the whole point! You can bring in an old Lego animation you made when you were 8, your thesis film from college, or a church youth group training video that you bought off of Ebay. Anything you'd like to show an audience. Anything at all.
We do have a couple of rules that help us keep the show running smoothly, but nothing that limits the types of things you can show.
Rule #1: At most Open Film Nights, we don't play any tape longer than 10 minutes long. We've only got two hours, so we don't let you bogart the whole evening with a rough cut of your feature film.
Rule #2: Sometimes, people bring in horribly unentertaining movies that could only possibly be funny to the people involved in making the video. To make sure that the audience is involved and gets a show that's fun to watch, we bring in a gong to each show and put it up on the stage at the front of the theater. At the beginning of the program, we pick one random person in the audience to be our official gonger of the evening and then hand that lucky someone the mallot. If the audience has decided through cries, moans and boos, the official gonger can get up out of his seat, walk down to the front of the theater, and whack the gong with the official mallot. Anytime that happens, we stop whatever we're showing and move on to the next randomly selected tape.
Rule #3: As an added incentive to bring something entertaining, we've set up a few prizes as well. At the end of the program, we ask the audience to vote for their favorite video by a round of applause. The winners get $100 in cash that night, and then are entered into the grand champions night of Open Filmers at the end of the year to win $500!
