Reflecting on this week’s class, I developed a new perspective and insight relative to the production and making of our film festival. That is, establishing a budget and gaining an understanding on the importance of financing. Here, it became clear that developing a budget would help our team to keep track of expenses, designate limits for spending, and develop an estimate of how much money we would need to raise to begin executing tasks. Throughout the production of our preliminary budget, we created a spreadsheet document to manage and keep track of all of our expenses. We ensured that all aspects of production were accounted for and any purchases associated with advertising, catering, film rights and also entertainment were documented and recorded onto the sheet.

Another important insight I gained is learning about the importance of overestimating fees and costs. As we are first-time film festival organisers, overestimating costs is an important strategy that will help us stay on the safe side of things and prepare us to face any unanticipated costs in the future. In our spreadsheet, we created two separate columns that contained actual costs and estimated costs. Here, the estimated costs are those that will be overestimated, whereas the actual costs are self-explanatory. I also found that the development of a preliminary budget will help us to establish our long-term goals and future possibilities, by thinking more realistically and logically about expenses and budgeting. Things like hiring an interpreter or translator to attend our event had to be disregarded for the time being due to budget reasons. However, I believe it’s also important not to entirely disregard a potential idea, as we don’t know how much money we will raise or earn as yet with our future sponsors and fundraising event.

Furthermore, the reading for this week also emphasises that there are other circumstances that need to be taken into consideration that will likely affect your budget (Bartosova, Kulhankova & Rausova 2015). Class this week has definitely made me more aware of other aspects of production that can impact our budget, including the costs and fees associated with screening rights. This is also an example of how a budget can help with establishing long-term goals and new possibilities, as the amount of money we have available to spend ultimately influences the types of films we can afford to screen.

References

Bartosova, K, Kulhankova, H & Rausova, Z 2015 ‘Knowing Yourself and Your Audience: Programming a Human Rights Film Festival’ in Setting Up a Human Rights Film Festival, vol. 2, pp. 27-46.