Southern Fried Flicks Film Festival attracts aspiring filmmakers from around South
By Tom Grant of the Augusta Metrospirit
Excerpts:
“Dear Sweet Emma” is one of about 100 films in the festival. All are by filmmakers from the South. Based on history, Cernak’s offering is apt to be one of the crowd favorites. Here’s a look at it, and two others likely to please the viewers, a mockumentary on Ultimate Frisbee called “For the Title” and the short feature “Deep Green” by an Augusta filmmaker.

“For the Title”
Student filmmakers Josh Long and Matthew Rogers delivered a surprisingly funny entry to the Southern Fried Flicks Film Festival. “For the Title” is a mockumentary about Ultimate Frisbee with a dry sense of humor in the style of “Napoleon Dynamite.”
Long and Rogers shot the film during their senior year at Bryan College in Dayton, Tenn. Long had made one film before, a short feature about a convention of hit men.
Long conceived and directed the film, although it might be an overstatement to say he “wrote” it. “What I did is I wrote the characters and I wrote some of situations,” Long says. “All the dialogue is improvised. When you have a project of that nature, you really have to rely on actors who can come up with good improvisational dialogue.”
Both Rogers and Long played Ultimate Frisbee, a game that looks like basketball crossed with football and played with a Frisbee. The film follows several principle characters on two teams — Venus Flytraps and Wolverines — through league play and into the championship game. They have stereotypical players taken to the extreme. Rogers describes them as a redneck, a geek, a prep girl, and a suck-up.
“Overall, the cast was fantastic and they’re the reason it’s funny,” Long says. “One character people have responded to most is Lawrence. He’s sort of a nerd type, I guess. He describes himself as an I-T tech guy at a coffee shop.”
“For the Title” has also been shown at a film festival in Toronto, where the response was good but smaller than the filmmakers expected. They were actually paid a portion of the gate at the showing there. “We made, after the conversion rate on the Canadian dollar, about 22 dollars,” Rogers says.
The film cost Long and Rogers about $4,000, most of which they spent on a digital video camera and a tripod. Rogers shot the feature and edited it on his own computer.
Rogers still laughs out loud when he sees his film, even though he’s watched it nearly 100 times.
“It’s just hysterical,” he says. “ I still laugh everytime I see it. The stuff they’re saying is just so ridiculous."