If brevity is the soul of wit, then Sunday evening's Rumschpringe Film Festival was absolutely hilarious.

Sure, most of the movies entered in the competition were not, in fact, comedies, but each had the brevity part of the definition down pat.

And whether the subject was a fire-starting dinosaur named Zippo, an accident-prone man getting ready for a big date, a boy lured by the promise of an infomercial for strength-enhancing drugs or a zombie plague spawned by Lancaster's controversial hotel tax and convention center, each film was tailor-made for people with short attention spans.

The object, said event coordinator Michael Hoober of Rumschpringe.com, a Lancaster-based arts-advocacy site, was to distill the creative drive of local filmmakers into features of five minutes or less in length.

"It's about making things happen in Lancaster," Hoober said Sunday as patrons of the first Rumschpringe film showing poured out of one of the theaters at Penn Cinema in Lititz. "This was an experiment to see if it would work."

It did succeed, Hoober said, though he admitted he would have liked to have more entries.

"My goal was 50," he said. "We only got about 34."

The best entries were culled from the herd by a team of judges led by local filmmaker Mary Haverstick, who selected award winners for Lancaster's own version of the Oscars.

Grand prizewinner Joseph Krzemienski took home a $1,000 award for his animated music video, "Cuidado."

Using music by the band Slo-Mo, the video features a sword-and-six-gun-wielding cowboy battling robot villains in a one-horse town.

"This is the first short film I've made," Krzemienski said Sunday. "It was based on characters I'd already created."

After honing his craft drawing comics, Krzemienski was hoping to break into freelance animation when Slo-Mo approached him about making a video.

"It was a passion project," he said. "I've never done anything like this before, but I hope it will be a gateway into the animation field."

Overall, Krzemienski said, he was impressed with the competition.

"I wasn't sure what kind of talent we had in this area," he said. "But I thought it was pretty good."

Krzemienski said he's already begun production on his Rumschpringe entry for 2009.

Vanessa Reisig, a Landisville gallery owner and one of the judges for the event, said the final cut "was a good mix" of video entries.

"Michael did a great job of coordinating this," she said. "It's a fantastic grass-roots event."

Allen Clements, who runs his own video production company, said he hopes to enter the competition next year.

"I thought it was great," he said. "And, being the first one, it can only get better."

The film festival will be screened again at Penn Cinema Sunday at 7 p.m., Hoober said, with additional screenings in March and April at various locations. For dates, times and locations, contact Hoober at contact@rumspringer.com.

E-mail: tknapp@lnpnews.com