SEDT Student Wins Best Screenplay At Las Cruces International Film Festival

When he was four years old, Harrison Hahne-Lum watched Spider-Man 2 for the first time. 

The experience inspired him to create his first movie. It was shot with his father’s flip-phone and featured stuffed animals.

“I loved rewatching it,” Hahne-Lum said. “I loved that it’s like a moment in time captured forever.”

Today, Hahne-Lum—a rising sophomore majoring in filmmaking at North Campus’ School of Entertainment & Design Technology—has graduated to bigger projects.

On April 7, the 19-year-old won Best Screenplay for his stop-motion short film, A Swan Story, at the Las Cruces

International Film Festival in New Mexico.

“[Harrison is] always comfortable asking the tough questions, which I think takes a lot of people a long time to discover how to do,” said North Campus film production professor Joshua Ellis, who taught Hahne-Lum this spring. “He’s continuously trying to better himself and he’s done that since day one.”

A Swan Story is a dramatic comedy that follows Sukaira, a blue origami swan who adopts a child and tries to find true love via speed dating. 

Sukaira faces rejection because she has a missing wing. However, after a fire breaks out and she saves the day, people start liking her. 

“I guess you could say the message is that people should love you for who you are, for what’s on the inside,” Hahne-Lum said. “If they only come to you because you found recent success or fame, you should ignore them.” 

A Swan Story runs for 15 minutes and 35 seconds and took 737 days to complete. 

It was shot using a Canon Rebel T7 and stop motion—a film technique in which objects are moved between photographed frames to give the illusion of motion. It can take about 12-24 still images to create one second of animation.

“Harrison is a gifted student who demonstrates impressive attention to detail,” said Thomas Demos, who was Hahne-Lum’s professor for two SEDT film courses this school year. “[He has] the patience and determination required to produce a high-quality stop-motion animation film.” 

From the start of the project, Hahn-Lum, who wrote, directed and edited the film,  faced various obstacles. 

He originally planned to use a clay figurine with aluminum wires as the central character, but it broke once he started using it. 

So he pivoted to paper.

“I knew nothing about origami,” Hahne-Lum recalls. “I watched a bunch of tutorials online. Most of them are guys with big, ugly fat fingers holding it. The camera quality is so low and sometimes it’s not even focused.”

The animated flick, which was shot in a bedroom with no air conditioning, was filmed with a budget of $200, often requiring the film aficionado to improvise. 

He used stacks of toilet paper to uphold bounce boards, ramen noodle containers for storage and sheets with math homework scribbled on it as light diffusers.

However, Hahne-Lum, who started the film as a junior in high school, says his greatest challenges were learning how to edit and managing his time. 

“It [was] kind of a lonely process,” he said. “I was just in a room by myself for hours.”

Although he often considered giving up, Hahne-Lum, who is autistic and dyslexic, wanted to leave his mark.

“I wanted to finally make a good film that people would enjoy, that people would laugh and cry [about],” he said.

A Swan Story was shown at the Hollywood Florida Film Festival last November—where Hahne-Lum won an award for Best Animation Director—and at the Morc Comadori Animation Festival in Japan. 

It recently won Best Animation at the Miami Web Series Festival, and will be screened at the FilmGate Miami Film Festival at the Silverspot Cinema on June 26. 

Hahne-Lum hopes to create a feature-length sequel to A Swan Story and one day become “a big-time Hollywood director.”

“Film is forever,” he said. “It’s like a permanent reminder of the mark you leave in the world.”

To see more of Hahne-Lum’s work, visit his website at https://hazardouscinemas.com/gsff-2023  or his Instagram @hazardous_cinemas.

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