Congratulations to Yaxuan Gao, one of the winners of the Film and Media Studies Summer Internship Award!
Yaxuan completed her internship with the Newport Beach Film Festival. Founded in 1999, the Newport Beach Film Festival has emerged as the largest international cinema event in coastal Southern California and plays a central role for filmmakers from all over the world bringing independent and studio films to Newport Beach. The festival also provides cinematic educational development programs to the greater Orange County Area.
Yaxuan was an integral part of the Programming and Marketing teams. In addition to helping the Programmers help decide what films should be accepted into the 2022 festival program, Yaxuan also conducted research about the films to find the most effective way to market them to the community. With the film reviewing process so strongly related to her production and marketing duties, Yaxuan hopes to leverage her skill in the next major step in her internship: producing a promotional video for the film selected to be at the festival.
Yaxuan had this to say about her time with the Newport Beach Film Festival: “As an FMS student, film reviewing is not really a challenging work to me but during this process, I have learned more than how to review a film through critics and audiences’ perspective but how to evaluate a work through looking at its production quality”
This scholarship is funded by a generous donation from UCI History alumni, Leon Dudevoir, in support of Film and Media Studies’ student internships. Mr. Dudevoir had a career as a film executive for New Line Cinemas, working on films like The Notebook, Rush Hour and Blade. He’s now retired and lives in Portland, and wanted to support current FMS students looking to enter the entertainment industry.