On Friday night, the Rialto Theater was packed with more than 500 filmgoers – and they weren’t all filmmakers.

The Grand Cinema’s fourth annual 72-Hour Film Competition, in which local teams get just three days to shoot and edit a five-minute film, attracted its biggest audience yet to the competition’s screening and awards presentation, nearly filling the Rialto. Twenty-eight short films were presented, ranging from first-time amateur to polished professional, and covering genres from comedy to horror to spoof.

Every year, films must include certain specific criteria, announced to aspiring teams at the start of the 72-hour filming period. This year’s films, shot over the first weekend of May, had to include the action of blowing bubbles, the line “I feel like I’ve (we’ve) been here before,” an area museum and a fortune cookie.

There were bubbles blown from a bottle, bubbles blown with gum, bubble bath and bubbles blown in a glass of water.

“I’ve feel like I’ve been here before” inspired some responses both predictable (a repeated scene in “Clueless in Tacoma”) and original (a girl reclaiming her flirting boyfriend in “Perkins Windows”).

Local museums appeared in a clearly preferential list. Most hit was the Tacoma Art Museum, followed closely by the Museum of Glass and Bridge of Glass. The Karpeles Manuscript Museum seemed popular for crime and horror.

The museum location also inspired artists Becky Frehse and Trinda Love, whose film “Clueless in Tacoma” featured artist Lynn di Nino as a confused museum patron with a bottomless Mary Poppins purse, as well as art and theater critic Alec Clayton and an entire exhibit in Impromptu Gallery.

It was the fortune cookie, though, that shaped many of the films’ plots. There were cookies that directly affected the readers’ futures for better (“Fortune’s Dance”) or worse (“Lost Path,” “Unfortunate Cookies”). There were cookies that interacted with each other, as in “The Bored Room” – “You will never get out of this meeting” followed by “EVER” – and cookies that commented ironically, as did the one held by a girl pushed off a roof in “Perkins Windows” – “You are going on an unexpected trip.”

After three-plus hours of short films, the awards were brief. Best Use of Prop went to “Risky Business,” for a cookie that appeared as a work of art in, naturally, the Tacoma Art Museum. Best Use of Dialogue went to “Forgettable” maker Phoebe Moore, who sang the line. Best Use of Action went to “Fortune’s 11,” where bubbles were blown to reveal security laser beams. Best Use of Location was given to “Tminus 72,” the latest from the makers of last year’s “True Grit,” who shot – among many popular Tacoma locations – Scott Fife’s puppy sculpture at the Tacoma Art Museum. An honorable mention was given to “Lost Path.”

Best Film was awarded to “Army of Two,” an ironic tale of two camo- and buzz-cut-wearing kids playing soldiers in Point Defiance who, chased by a criminal, disarm and kill him, to rejoin their mom happily in the family SUV. Made by a single family (director/cameraman Scott Gribble, actor Olga Gribble and their sons Noah and Nathan), the film was shot in six hours after a reconnaissance trip to see “Iron Man.”

The Audience Favorite Award went to “Foolish Games,” a spoof on the 72-Hour Film Competition and filmmakers themselves that featured a lookalike of News Tribune film critic Soren Andersen, rising up as a zombie to attack noisy filmgoers.

Entries will be shown on Click! Network on Demand, and are available on DVD at The Grand Cinema.

Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568