Week 8: What were the key insights you gained from – the readings from week 7 & week 8, and discussions of them in class on Friday 29 April.

This week we had attended class online via zoom where we began preparing for our call of submissions post to go live. We also had in-depth discussions regarding this week’s readings and related them back to each of our specific departments. In particular, my team (design and marketing) focused on analysing sections of the readings that were relevant to promotions, advertising, and ways to go about boosting visibility. Specifically, I found the Rambouskova (2015) reading on ‘How to Successfully Promote Your Festival’, to be very insightful and helpful with regards to my area of responsibility. The article emphasised some of the strategies that we could potentially use to gain attention from both our target audience and a wider demographic. For example, a communication strategy we could use to garner media attention, is to develop promotional material including posters, create social media posts, and even conduct interviews with members (Rambouskova 2015).

With this, our team decided to boost our call for submissions post on both Facebook and Instagram, as a way to acquire more attention from the media and heighten our visibility. As the Facebook platform works on two types of objectives, to increase engagement or boost website visits, we opted to create a post specifically for enhancing our engagement. We were also able to create a custom audience by pinpointing several continents of the world. As Rambouskova (2015, p.105) describes, ‘creating buzz about your festival in social media’ can be a huge asset to your promotion. In saying this, boosting our post will help us gain the attention of new audiences and followers, and even create more excitement for our festival.

Another insight I gained from the reading on ‘Film Festival Form: A Manifesto’ (Cousins 2012), is to think of film festivals as stories that contain narrative structures and individual aesthetics. This made me reflect on what our festival’s narrative is and how it has helped with the shaping of our overall design and style guide. From an outer perspective, I can say that I am definitely impressed with what our team has produced thus far, in terms of the consistent theme we have stuck with and how it tells a story in itself. That is, the art of visual storytelling. More so, these readings have also provided me with a new perspective and awareness towards the ways we can acquire more media attention, and ways to help our festivals aesthetic and narrative flourish.

References

Cousins, M 2012, ‘Film Festival Form: A Manifesto’, viewed 29 May 2022, <https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JrrVM1tj04ApfDt20N7FAcKF6ZmOOOiK/edit>.

Rambouskova B 2015 ‘How to Successfully Promote Your Festival’ in Setting Up a Human Rights Film Festival, vol. 2, pp. 97-114.