Weeks 11-12

Thoughts

This semester saw two periods where I dedicated a substantial amount of my time to MIYFF, the first was weeks 3-6 when I was watching and choosing films to screen, and the other were week’s 11 and 12, where I was organising publicity for the event.

Overall, I thought that I did really well to get press for a completely unknown event that wasn’t actually 100% locked in. Having less then two weeks of lead time I knew that any chance of getting newspaper stories would be next to impossible and despite regretting not contacting press earlier in the semester, at the time I wasn’t comfortable contacting media without having a venue or program for the festival. Despite the crazily short lead time that I had, I did manage to get a bunch of community radio which I thought was actually really endearing. I managed to lock in interviews on RRR, 3CR x 2, JOY, Kiss, WYN, WBC, SYN and a couple of online stories, one of which on a website with over 20k followers.

Despite feeling good that the huge amount of time I dedicated to pitching stories and in some cases, asking media for favours, and actually getting stuff done in an insanely short amount of time, the trouble I had to get responses from classmates to actually do the interviews was really disheartening and kind of annoying.

I know that literally all of the class have a myriad of outside Uni commitments to attend to, but the struggle I had to go through to get some people to donate 5 minutes of their time to do a phone interview was really annoying and off putting and in the end, I decided to a number of the interviews myself. In my nearly two years of publicity experience, I have never worked on a project where it was harder to persuade someone from the team to do an interview than it was to actually lock in an interview.

Although I was really disappointed in the lack of help that I got from the MIYFF team in donating their time to do interviews, I found it really endearing that so many local community radio programs and online sites were happy to support our event. I think that if there was to be a MIYFF 2.0, which gave me a much bigger lead time and maybe a more impressive closing night venue, I’d be able to get some really great press.

Here’s a WIP of the publicity I managed to get for MIYFF 1.

MIYFF Publicity schedule

RADIO

SYN – Wed 22 May

Alice / Sean

http://syn.org.au/melbourne-international-youth-film-festival-interview/?fbclid=IwAR1taI-B4xXbsqiri2sBQRYAvqLzwxbPwb3Fr3-_a0Bk7CFqZ3ggnAkPSAY

Radio Wyn FM – Sat 25 May

Arnel

http://emit-media-production.s3.amazonaws.com/3wyn/movie-metropolis/2019/05/25/2000/201905252000_movie-metropolis_24.m4a

Radio WBC – Sun 26 May

Ben

https://filmreviews.net.au/melbourne-international-youth-film-festival-interview-with-ben-veress/