The Spring 2026 semester has reached its end, and with it, countless Communication Arts students have hit “submit” on their final assignments for the year. In Professor Kelley Conway’s Film Festivals course, students had the opportunity to get creative with their final project. Rather than solely offering an option for students to write a research paper, Conway allowed them to visually document and investigate aspects of the Wisconsin Film Festival. Whether this was through capturing photos throughout the Festival to tell a story or producing a short documentary, numerous students in the course jumped at the opportunity to demonstrate their gained knowledge in adaptive and creative ways.
“A lot of these students are budding filmmakers, so I thought it would be fun and challenging to offer them a visual project to end the semester,” Conway said. “They have storytelling skills. They have rhetorical skills. They are capable of using all the skills they’ve developed in Communication Arts to go out into the world and document, chronicle, investigate, and analyze whatever phenomena they’re interested in.”
Gwen McMahon and Gavin McLean, two 2026 Communication Arts graduates from Conway’s course, started their visual project by meeting with Terry Kerr, who organizes venues, volunteers, and education for the Wisconsin Film Festival. The pair chose to document Kerr and a group of volunteers as they set up Music Hall to be a screening venue. 2026 marked the final year Music Hall would be used for the Festival due to construction. They hope their documentary will act as a tribute to the incredible team of volunteers and the historic space they’ve worked hard to transform year over year.
“Music Hall is a very old building, and it’s not made to be a movie theater,” McMahon said. “The Film Festival is one of the only times people get to be in there, especially members of the community.”
The space is acoustically set up for cinema, even though it’s not built for it. For the last several years, the Festival’s team of volunteers has transformed the space in a matter of hours, setting up the screen and projector so viewers could enjoy their programming in the historical space. McMahon and McLean visited the volunteers as they underwent the set-up process to gather photos, videos, and interviews. They also attended numerous screenings there to film audience reactions to the space.
“Everyone who works on the Festival has been very genuine to us and eager to share everything they know,” McLean said. “Terry specifically sat down with us to talk for 30 minutes, even during the busiest part of her year. It was incredibly kind of her to give us some of her spare time for this project and make us feel so welcome.”
As they wrapped up their documentary, McMahon and McLean reflected on the opportunity this project gave them.
“The experience you get from doing a hands-on project stays with you,” McLean said. “A lot of people write papers, and they don’t remember what they wrote about a year later. There are all pluses and no minuses for creative class projects.”
McMahon and McLean are excited to share their documentary with the Film Festival team and hope to submit it to the Festival in 2027. Both recent graduates are grateful they got to interact with the event so closely and be a part of the film-loving community the Festival creates each year. Their documentary will likely be treasured by the Festival team for years to come, as it captured the smiling faces of audience members as they were dazzled by a film in Music Hall one last time.
