Middle school students took to the red carpet last week in celebration of their big screen debut, flanked by an entourage of adoring fans and with paparazzi in tow.

The eighth annual GeekThink Films premiere marked the culmination of a collaborative eight-month effort at the Academy for Advanced and Creative Learning, a charter school for gifted and talented students in Colorado Springs School District 11.

Each year, students in Anthony Szpak’s language arts class work together to write, produce, direct, shoot and edit a short film on a topic of their choosing. After plenty of tweaks and rewrites, friends and family gather in support of their loved ones’ hard work in a makeshift Hollywood premiere event.

“Who are you wearing? Is that Armani?” shouted Sonya Gazdik as the first batch of students made their way from a luxury vehicle and up the school’s front walkway. Gazdik drove all the way from Florida for her granddaughter, Melfina Cosmato, who worked graphic design on the project.

Past installments of GeekThink Films — which is the nation’s first fully integrated film program in a middle school — have told fictional tales of youth homelessness and bullying and captured real-life stories of the city’s senior citizens and the socially distanced.

This year’s film, titled “Red and Yellow,” explores conformity through the lens of one yellow-clad girl who arrives at a school where everyone else is wearing red. Mocked for her differences, the girl changes in order to fit in, but it isn’t long before her true colors start to resurface.

“It’s really about how difficult it is to really stay true to who you are when you’re in a big group of people, and once you lose your identity by transforming to be what others want, how much it breaks you just as a human being,” Szpak said. “The best thing is that (the students) haven’t been inundated with schooling or the rules of filmmaking, so they get to break a ton of things without having to be convinced to take risks.”

For the yearlong lesson on storytelling, speech and collaboration, Szpak draws on his professional background as a former Los Angeles-based script writer. His class is the highest-level language arts offering at Academy ACL, which serves K-8 students who often work at high school and college levels.

Given their advanced skills, finding schoolwork that pushes students to build perseverance can sometimes prove a challenge, school Director Nikki Myers said. But unlike a worksheet, the film can’t be produced in a single day.

“We find it so good for them to see how many months of work go into just a few minutes of film,” said Myers, whose daughter was part of the inaugural Geekthink Films project before going on to major in theater at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. “They’ve had to persevere. Something always breaks. Something always doesn’t work right. … We love that piece of how they can’t just have a product and whip it out and be done. They have to keep working at it for so long.”

Director Ella Hefner and lead actress and producer River Merrell agree.

The story took several creative departures from its initial conception, the students said. Lines of dialogue were added. New scenes were created. Shots were adjusted after watching them play out in person.

“We’re a ton of 13-year-olds who are trying to make a movie. It’s not gonna be as easy as we think,” Merrell said. “I learned a lot about having to trust the process.”

As audience members settled into their seats and students shook off their premiere day jitters, the short film rolled on the projector overhead. It was showtime.

“The kids have fought with each other, they’ve fought back against me, they’ve disagreed, they’ve stood up on things that they really believe in,” Szpak said. “The truth is, it’s the full year of watching how they learned to deal with conflict management, how to be able to deal with their own emotions and deal with deadlines and pressure. I’m just really proud.”

Previous films can be streamed at geekthinkfilms. org. “Red and Yellow” will be uploaded to the website at a future date for the community to watch at its leisure.