It won’t be long until it’s show time at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art.

Participants and event planners have been preparing for months for the 14th annual Jay Sanders Film Festival, which will be March 29 at 7 p.m. at the museum in Auburn.

Bradley Tillery, a graduate student at Auburn University, is helping plan and carry out the event, along with the Radio, Television and Film Department and some student organizations at Auburn.

“Preparation takes literally months,” said Tillery, who once entered one of his own films into the Jay Sanders Film Festival. “Dr. Overpeck works to set the date and location for the festival, which is usually done in May or June of the previous year. Then Kevin Smith, a professor in our department and creative director at createTWO, will create a poster and logo.”

Then, Tillery and Overpeck work out all the logistics of the event, including when to send out invitations to high schools and universities across the country and recruiting help from members of the Auburn University Public Relations Council of Alabama.

“I usually contact the AUPRCA in November to recruit a few people who would like firsthand experience writing press releases, dealing with media and promoting an event,” Tillery said. “It is always my goal to make sure those who do volunteer on the committee get the most out of the experience so they may put any work on their resume and in their portfolios later on.”

Final calls for film submissions are then made, where blogs are contacted and posts are made on social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, film blogs and message boards.

Professor Emeritus Jay Sanders was a professor at Auburn University for 33 years. He was the first to introduce media courses to the school. In 1996, the Auburn Film Society honored him by naming its annual film festival after him.

The festival draws in films from around the country and internationally by high school and college filmmakers, with five genres of submissions – abstract, experimental, animation, documentary and narrative. The films must have been produced within the past two years and cannot exceed 15 minutes in length.

Prior to the night of JSFF, all film submissions are viewed by Tillery and a few other event volunteers and are narrowed down to the five best films in each category. Those films will then be screened on the night of the event and are the finalists for cash prizes.

Judges for the festival include former actor MIchael Young, who is also CEO of Michael Young Media, which produces television programming; Rick Pukis, a filmmaker and an associate professor of communications at Augusta State University; and Chuck Hemard, an assistant professor in the art department at Auburn University.

Annette Martinez, who has been involved with film since the age of 10, is one of the finalist hopefuls of this year’s film festival.

“At the age of 10, I performed in numerous theaters, and as a young adult I decided to pursue acting,” said Martinez, writer and director of the film, “Rhine Maidens.” “During this time, I found my love for cinema and decided to create a cable access show, which led me to film school.”

Set in World War II, Martinez’s film submission “Rhine Maidens” is a story of two young Jewish sisters who are part of the “underground railroad” and discover there is a mole in their group.

She said making films is a difficult and expensive process (It took her entire paycheck to make “Rhine Maidens last year”). As writer and director of the film, her involvement was from its inception, production, post-production and when it is viewed by audiences on the silver screen.

Martinez doesn’t take all the credit for the film though.

“Without my brilliant cast and crew, the movie would still be on paper,” Martinez said.

She hopes to continue turning movies on paper into movies on the big screen as she aspires to become a screenwriter. Until then, she said she is working on writing a feature script to shoot during her summer break, and she will continue using real people as her inspiration.

“Their honesty causes me to dig further into their world and it is from that exploration that my movie ideas begin,” Martinez said.

Another hopeful finalist in this year’s film festival is Tim Tsai.

His film, “Post-Racial,” is about a screenwriter who embarks on a quest to eliminate all racial stereotypes from his movie.

“I first got interested in filmmaking as an undergraduate at U.C. Berkeley after watching Valerie Soe’s experimental short, ‘All Orientals Look the Same,’” Tsai said. “It opened my eyes to the power of mass media and immense possibilities of sound and image.”

Other filmmakers and writers have inspired Tsai and his filmmaking. The most inspiring to him is Shelton Jackson “Spike” Lee, an American film director, actor, writer and producer who has produced more than 35 films since 1983.

Tsai says Lee’s talent, ability to take risks and his inner drive inspire his own work as he creates films. Many of Lee’s films also deal with race relations, just as Tsai’s “Post-Racial” does.

It took much of that same drive (and time) for the young filmmaker to create “Post-Racial.”

“(It took) a year of writing, four months of casting and pre-production, a seven-day shoot and five months of post-production, all part-time while attending film school and working as a teaching assistant to produce my film,” Tsai said.

He says filmmaking is a challenge at all levels because the filmmaker’s resources will always be limited. It is also difficult, he says, because the film’s collaborative nature with actors and others involved forces him to give up creative control and trust others.

Tsai plans to continue giving up that control and trusting others though, hoping to develop a career as a film editor and making movies as a writer/director.

But for now, Tsai and Martinez are focusing on exposing their films at festivals such as JSFF.

To find out more details about the Jay Sanders Film Festival, visit http://media.cla.auburn.edu/cmjn/festival/index.html.