Do you love online videos? Would you like to discover more and hang out with people who enjoy them too?

Then Ames Finds Films is for you.

This year, the web film festival will be holding its fourth annual event at DG’s Tap House on Friday at 8 p.m.

The process starts before the festival. Users submit their favorite online videos from YouTube and Vimeo to a list of categories on the Ames Finds Films website.

Then, some of the videos will be chosen to be played at the event. While there, audience members will use their phones to vote for which videos are their favorites.  

Some of the categories include: animals, commercials, inspiring, shorty (15 seconds or less) and parody.

Tom Lindsley is the planner and host of AFF. It began as an event he hosted out of his apartment. Now he takes it to DG’s each year for other members of the community to enjoy.

He has had high attendance records as the event pulled in about 250 people two years ago. Last year, there was a winter storm during the festival, but 150 guests still came to fill DG’s and watch videos.

“You could barely walk down Main Street without slipping, so I think that kept some people away,” Lindsley said about the weather. “Hopefully this year the weather holds, and we can get back up to the numbers we had the previous year.”

Leading up to this year’s festival, Lindsley has been advertising it online and through posters around town. He has also encouraged many of the people who have submitted videos in the past to do so again.

The night of the show, Lindsley will take the stage and mention a few rules about the fest and thank people who made it possible. After that, he engages with the crowd and lets the show go on naturally.  

“Once I’m up on stage it’s pretty much ad-lib and trying to stay conversational with the audience until the end of the night,” Lindsley said.

Lindsley thinks that this year’s festival could be the last. This is because the way people view videos online has been changing.

In the past, Lindsley was able to connect his website with YouTube and Vimeo easily. He said that other websites do not work as well with festival’s submission format like these two do.

“The media landscape has changed so much in the last five years that YouTube is not people’s primary source for viral videos anymore, and through other services it’s harder to get access to those videos to put into a festival format,” Lindsley said.

Final year of the festival or not, Lindsley is excited to put on something entertaining. He said that no matter what, he can’t wait to get a room full of people laughing.

Lindsley has learned a few things along the way too. He said running the festival over the years has given him a chance to be creative. Plus, he now knows how to put an event of this type on. 

“It’s taught me some parts of project management that I hadn’t really thought through before, scheduling venues and putting together an entertainment production,” Lindsley said.

For this article, Lindsley picked out five videos to share from past Ames Finds Films that he considers favorites. Without further ado, here they are, straight from the mind behind the festival. 

5. “That’s a 10” – “This is pure AFF style. Even after fifty times of watching this one, I still laugh.”

4. “Hip Hop Dressage” – “Because Animals feature prominently in AFF videos, I thought this would be a good pick. It’s both a mash-up and an animal video, and the juxtaposition of the hip-hop with the upper-crusty sport of dressage is too perfect.”

3. “Going to the Store” – “This one has a soft spot in my heart, because it won the grand prize at the first ever festival prior to AmesFindsFilms that I called ‘YourTube.’ The bizarro nature of this one speaks pretty well to the spirit of AFF.”

2. “How is Pragnet Formed?” – “Everyone in the audience died laughing at this one. Poorly spelled Yahoo Answers questions are something we’ve all run into. Unfortunately for the authors of these, most everyone was also questioning why people with that intelligence were also bringing children into the world.”

1.  “Miley Cyrus – Wrecking Ball (Chatroulette Version)” – “This one tops the list because of the variety of reactions it got from audience members. Not only did it win grand prize in 2015, but there was both laughter and tears in the audience. One festival-goer explained the tears of joy as a result of seeing many different types of strangers embracing this guy doing his thing when they easily could have made fun of him.”