By Chelsea Reil

After many students showed their support for President-elect Barack Obama, a group of student filmmakers said they wanted to make sure he follows through on the promises he made on the campaign trail.

Three Northeastern students are in the process of making the documentary short “Are You Listening?” to submit to the Apple Insomnia Film Festival, which allows students to create and submit films less than three minutes in length, according to Apple’s website. Although this year’s festival is postponed until after the holiday season due to “unexpected challenges,” according to the site, it hasn’t stopped these filmmakers from getting a head start on the competition.

Braden Sgambati, a middler criminal justice major who is working on the film, said making a film about Obama and his platform felt like the natural thing to do.

“I think we were just talking, and it happened to be when the election was heating up and we just had the opportunity to vote, so it was on the tip of our tongues,” he said.

Sgambati said he agreed with Obama’s campaign platforms, but said he is skeptical whether all of the changes Obama pledged will actually come through.

“Now that we’ve bought into the whole change thing and mobilized and elected him, he needs to listen to us,” Sgambati said.

In the film, Sgambati said he and his team stopped people on the street and asked them one question: “What would you say to President-elect Obama if he was here right now?”

“We got a lot of interesting responses, but the main one was education, making it more readily available for everyone,” he said. “The war in Iraq, the environment … students said a lot of interesting things.”

Mike Shearer, a middler business and entrepreneurship major, also contributed to the film by mixing and producing the piece.

“The second that [Obama] won, people went crazy,” Shearer said. “They were flipping out that there’s actually a person we can keep our faith in. The last eight years have been absolutely terrible. And now we want to know what [he is] going to do for us.”

Shearer said the responses the group got from students in the film were astonishing.

“[We got] answers … from people who are 20, 21, 22 years old,” he said. “We wanted it to be a wake-up call.”

According to Obama’s website, some of his plans for the future include: the creation of a new tax credit worth $4,000 in exchange for community service for students, the creation of a new “Making Work Pay” tax credit of up to $500 per person or $1,000 per working family, and the creation of five million new jobs.

Sara Draper, a middler history major and one of the students interviewed in the film, spoke about the importance of energy independence and weaning our nation off foreign oil.

“[Protecting the environment] is important just for environmental prevention, but I also think it’s one of the most ignored policies,” Draper said. “Everyone talked about it, and how important it is, but very few people actually fight for it and make policy and vote for it to pass in legislation.”

Draper said she is optimistic for the future of our country under the leadership of Obama.

“I think that most of his promises will be carried out, because I do believe that he believes in change, but obviously he can’t fulfill all those promises in four years,” she said. “He has to prioritize, but I just don’t know what he’s going to prioritize yet.”

The film is currently about three minutes in length, but Shearer said the group has plans to create an extended version after the original has been entered in the film festival.

“Maybe like 35 to 40 minutes [on] beyond the students and out to the average person,” he said. “All the way up to people who have seen the Civil Rights Movement. We want to get the older generation, people who are like, ‘I’m 80 years old. What are you really going to do for me?'”

But Sgambati said the film feels longer than three minutes. And because the group used a high-definition camera in addition to mixing equipment and the Apple editing program Final Cut, it seems like a professional piece of work, he said. Sgambati said he and his friends even composed some of the music used in the piece. Overall, he said he is proud of the product because it is a meaningful piece of work.

“We are really trying to gauge the students’ attitudes about what happened in this historic election and how we want to take a bigger part now that he got us interested,” he said. “That’s how I feel and I know a lot of other people do too. We really want him to listen.”