These last two weeks leading up to MIYFF opening night have been completely hectic. Between the anxiety about selling enough tickets, the fear of failing the guests and the good old university induced existential crisis, my mental state is comparable to Poland in 1942, which, in case you didn’t know, was screwed. But, hey, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and we are almost there! So let’s buckle up and reflect on what is actually happening.

Crippling stress is a great teamwork exercise

One fascinating thing about staging MIYFF was establishing workflows and communication between a group of people who barely know each other at all.  I feel like we managed that very well as a class and were continuing to do it successfully throughout the semester. Since the very beginning, spreadsheets and google docs were created to keep track of everyone’s roles and responsibilities, and we even set up our own private MIYFF Facebook group to communicate with the class. It was a bit funny, we did all of that in weeks 1 and 2 and then I found those instructions in week 4 reading:

Establish clear communication structures. You have to create a structure that can be used to pass information on to each other. The more informed everyone on the team is, the less errors will be made and the better prepared you will be to react if something does go wrong (and something always does!). While no single person can know everything, everyone should know who will have what information, and how they can be contacted if necessary (via a list of phone numbers, names, etc.)

So, as a class, we understood and executed all of that before ever reading the academic guidelines! Don’t think I’ve ever been in a class where students were so eager to be accessible by the classmates:) In all seriousness, teamwork and division of labour is one of my key intakes from this course. I have learnt how to properly organise an efficient communication system across various social media platforms and keep track of everyone’s input and workload. This skill is transferable to any job and is incredibly useful in personal life too, and I’m very grateful to have acquired it.

A clear evidence that our team worked as a clock in these past two weeks, was that people didn’t always know what others were doing. Everyone were carrying out their roles responsibly and effectively, so there was no need for designers to control management and vice- versa. The job was just done – and you didn’t even notice it because it was well done and on time!  In my experience, that is rarely the case.

No one owes you sh*t

The most important and time-consuming part of my job took place at the earlier stages of the festival planning, so for the past 2 weeks I have been trying to get people to talk or post about us on social media. And one learning that I noticed straight away is that people don’t care. It happened several times that people simply wouldn’t get back to me or stop answering for good all of a sudden or simply go back on their promises. And I’m not talking some random kids, no, I’m talking big social media groups, radio stations and even RMIT themselves. RESA (RMIT Entrepreneurship & Start-up Association) for instance, promised to post about us on their page and then just didn’t. I emailed them several times to remind and haven’t heard back. Wow. RMIT social media accounts kept referring me to a certain email address but, them too, never gave me an answer even after several follow-ups. I, and other team members, have followed pretty much all the guidelines from week 5 reading that focued on promoting a film festival, and the only other thing that was suggested to get people to promote your festival was paying people:

Once you establish yourself, you might look for more professional help with public relations. For example, after three editions, Human Rights Arts & Film Festival in Australia paid for services from a PR agency who had experience working in film; they found this additional help with PR made a significant difference in the amount of press they received as well as their audience numbers.

Look for influential personalities from different social backgrounds, introduce them your festival and ask them to spread the news in their own circles. Remember that a personal recommendation can be much more valuable than any official content published in the media

So, another very important takeaway from the chaos that has been the past two weeks- people don’t owe you anything. Just because I am interested in MIYFF and because it is important for me, doesn’t mean that anyone else have to feel the same way. Sad, but true.

In my future projects, I hope I will have more time for preparation and planning to strengthen a brand I’m working on and get more people on board. Even if not, I will now know to turn my expectation down a bit and reach out to more people for a higher chance of a successful negotiation.

All in all, it’s been exhausting and nerve-wrecking, but also exciting and incredibly educational. Hopefully, tomorrow it will all be worth it!

Word count: 872 (sorry)

Cited:

Andrea Kuhn, “Who Is Organising It? Importance of Production and Team Members (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.” in Setting Up a Human Rights Film Festival, vol. 2, Human Rights Film Network, Prague, 2015, pp. 71-83.

Matthea de Jong and María Carrión, “Adding Water to the Soup Pot: Finding Resources for Your Festival (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.” in Setting Up a Human Rights Film Festival, vol. 2, Human Rights Film Network, Prague, 2015, pp. 115-129.