Side Effect by Jamie Carreiro, part of the 2007 RISD Film/Animation/Video Festival.

Parents will get to witness the results of what they’ve been paying for over the past four years — and the public can get a peek at someone who may be the next Steven Spielberg or Sofia Coppola — when the graduating seniors at the Rhode Island School of Design put their films on screen in the annual Film/Animation/Video Festival starting at 7 p.m. tomorrow at the RISD Auditorium.

Works by 39 seniors will be shown between tomorrow and Saturday in the festival. In a preview of some of them, this year’s show looks like one of the best of recent years.

One of the best previewed is Jamie Carreiro’s Side Effect, a smartly done thriller that’s tightly acted and professionally photographed. It’s about a young man who takes a job with a highly regarded pharmaceutical company, only to discover — uh-oh! — that there are unsavory secrets locked away in the bowels of the firm’s headquarters. There’s more than one good jolt, too, in this near-future tale (a crawl line on a TV newscast mentions “President-elect Obama”) about the aftermath of a virus that has killed hundreds of thousands. The film’s 26 minutes zip by in a flash and may leave you begging for more. Stretch out the plot for another hour, which shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish, and you’d have a film camera-ready for the multiplex.

Rachel Israel’s Brandon is only a dozen minutes long, but efficiently encapsulates the horrors of dating. It’s about a young woman who is “looking for that special someone” and allows a friend to set her up on her first date. The guy turns out to be the geeky, awkward Brandon of the title. He blows bubbles in his milkshake at dinner and compliments her on her eyeglasses by calling them “scintillating . . . it’s like you have four eyes.”

Almost immediately she realizes that Brandon is not the guy for her, but agrees to a second date. “He asked. What was I going to say, ‘No’?” she explains. Brandon turns out to be the maddeningly persistent date from hell in this breezy warning about the dangers of blind dating.

Conor O’Kelly-Lynch’s Arcadia is a marvelously done and clever 3-D computer animation about a pair of buddies whose visit to a video arcade turns into a wild adventure when one of them gets sucked into the video game where he encounters an angel and monsters. With his pal at the controls trying to rescue him from the clutches of the fiends, this inventive film is both comical and clever.

Even more impressive to see is Edmund Earle’s Screen, an elaborately composed black-and-white 3-D animation which recreates the ornate interior of a 1920s movie palace. Set in 1939, it has a film within the film about a director who is holding the world premiere of his latest innovative 2007-style arty creation at the theater. “A 3-year-old could have made your film,” says the Ingrid Bergman-type girlfriend to the Paul Henreid-type director at the end of his film. The real star, however, is the photo-realism computer animation used to create the fabulously intricate interior of the grand theater as well as the almost-familiar stars. A tag line at the end of the film says the “official production cost” was $200. Astonishing.

Anyone who has been driven nuts by a computer will be able to relate to Peter Lefferts’ Rules at Play, a funny meditation on the clearly defined rules that proscribe the various functions of computers, ranging from a media player to the old video game Pong. There are funny dancing TV monitors, too, as well as a clever reworking of Mary Had a Little Lamb.

Some of the films are simple. Tom DesLongchamp’s Kid Show is a sparely drawn but sweet animated short about a day in the life of three giggling brothers who view life in their own peculiar nonsensical way. Elaine Lee’s I Am Pillowcat follows a stuffed pillow that discovers a gang of dust bunnies, who look like tiny bunnies, and the origins of itself. It sounds profound, but it’s done with sweet innocence.

There’s more fun to be had in Christopher Carboni’s animated Mirror Madness, in which a squirrel and a cow visit a carnival and discover unsettling terrors going on behind the scenes in the House of Mirrors. The four-minute film is done in a style that looks sort of like old-fashioned Krazy Kat animation. It’s oddly charming and, in the end, udderly nutty.

Also simply done, but quite different in tone is Reiko Murakami’s Kujira, a sepia-colored line drawing short in which a girl leaves her forever-sewing mother at home to strike out on her own. It’s a voyage of self discovery, although in the end she realizes that no matter how far one travels, one’s home is always with one.

Jacklyn Chi’s Willing Subjects and Better People uses the things that fascinate Chi the most — her family, an old friend, herself — in this self-conscious film. As Chi is poked and rubbed by an acupressure specialist, she meditates on her life at home where her mother is happy cleaning house, feeding her goldfish, petting her cat; her father looks up from watching TV on the couch to tell Chi how wonderful she is. There’s also an elderly friend, a legend-in-her-own-mind painter who covers the walls of her apartment with scribbled artwork that she describes as masterpieces. The film bounces between these three segments jarringly. Chi may find this journey of self-discovery fascinating, but others may not.

Tickets for the RISD Film/Animation/Video Festival are $5 for the public; $3 with a student ID.

mjanuson@projo.com