Seniors Anne Rentz, Lexi Nails and Emma Smith are counting down the days until their film “Two Girls, One Ghost” will be screened at Cannes Film Festival’s Short Film Corner.

“Getting to be selected as one of the top four films at Clayton State was one thing, but when I found out our movie had been accepted to be screened at this year’s Cannes Film Festival– an honor given to only a few of the best films from CMF– I was sort of shocked,” Rentz said.

The girls entered “Two Girls, One Ghost” in Campus MovieFest, the world’s largest student film and music festival, through Clayton State University. Rentz was able to enter the contest because she is a dual-enrolled student there.

Colleges around the nation hold an annual short film contest in which college students submit their works. The students create a less than five minute film to enter into this competition.

CMF chooses the top 30 videos from all applicants across the country. These films are screened every year at Cannes, France, to boost the film industry and celebrate indie cinema at an international level. This year the festival is May 13-24.

Rentz left on May 10 and will stay a week to attend the festival. Rentz started a Go Fund Me page to raise money for her trip.

Rentz said she hopes to meet some interesting filmmakers while in Cannes. She also plans to attend workshops and some movie premieres. Since her hotel is right on the beachfront, she said she will also be enjoying the beaches of south France.

“I could definitely see myself working in the film industry,” Rentz said. “Maybe it will happen and maybe it won’t, but I can see plenty of possibilities.”

In addition to going to Cannes, Rentz will also be going to the 15th Annual CMF Hollywood Film Summit July 8-12.  Nails and Smith hope to be able to join her on that trip.  The CMF judges give out awards, called jury awards, to the top four films submitted from each college. Those who receive this award are invited to move on to the next stage of CMF competition in Hollywood. The girls received the jury award for their film . Their film will be screened and eligible for further awards at the film summit.

The girls spent hours filming and editing. After Rentz said she wrote the script in less than an hour, the three of them filmed their four-and-a-half minute video in the span of two days.

“The idea for the movie came up because Emma and I are horror movie fans, and we always wanted to do a parody of a lot of the cliches that appear in them,” Rentz said. “The second I read the email announcing that CMF was coming to Clayton State, we immediately jumped on the opportunity.”

Rentz mentioned the parody during Government class to Nails and Smith. The idea for the film began without any serious intentions, but it blossomed into a solid idea within a couple weeks.

“Anne asked me if I would help her make a video for a competition,” Nails said. “I agreed on the condition that she would give me food while we were working on it.” Amid plates of  spaghetti and pizza, they spent hours one weekend in February focused on filming. Food wasn’t the only thing the girls got from working on the video.

“We got some pretty funny bloopers, but unfortunately lost them since we had to return the memory card to Clayton State with all the footage,” Rentz said. “I’m sure some other contestants got some good enjoyment out of those.”

Nails remembers a particular mishap in which she was scripted to fake a fall. She ended up actually falling, but the camera wasn’t rolling. The girls had to re-shoot the scene about 10 times to get it right.

The girls made changes to the script during the filming process. “The thing that was really frustrating was that there was one scene where Anne put 10 pounds of makeup on my face– it took a really long time, like 20 minutes– but it got cut because the scene was kind of pointless,” Smith said.

Since Rentz choose Nails and Smith, who don’t attend Clayton State, to star in the film, she had to complete the final stage of the video alone. “CMF allowed me to have whoever I wanted act in the film as long as they signed a release form,” Rentz said, “but all the technical and behind-the-scenes stuff had to be done by a student of the participating university.”

They  finished filming finished on a Sunday and the application was due that Tuesday. While everything from the filming to the editing went smoothly, disaster struck in the final minutes before the submission deadline.

Rentz finished the film Monday night and went to sleep with the uploading process underway. It wasn’t until she awoke in the morning and found the exporting halted that she panicked.

“I tried everything I could and eventually sent an SOS text message to CMF’s tech support, but they ended up not responding until lunchtime, which made me upset,” Rentz said. “So here I was, frantically button-mashing while chugging down my coffee, seeing if I could fix the thing.”

Rentz finally asked her cousin, who works professionally with videos, for help, and they fixed the issue by directly plugging in the camera to her laptop. “As my cousin told me, when it comes to video editing, there’s never not a problem,” she said.

Despite a rocky uploading process, “Two Girls, One Ghost” is just a few days away from its debut screening, but the trio agreed that the filming experience was a reward in itself.

“The other girls and I are constantly quoting our own lines from the film, as silly as it sounds,” Rentz said, “and we are hoping to do other short, silly films over the summer before we all go to college.”