Week 10: What were the key insights you gained from – the Media Factory websites documenting the 2019 and 2021 Festival Experience film festivals 

Reflecting on the 2019 Festival Experience studio, it was very exciting to observe how the students were able to create a film festival from scratch that had the privilege of being held onsite. As first-time festival makers, I was very impressed by the teams overall production process of constructing the Melbourne International Youth Film Festival (MIYFF). As I am part of the design team for this year’s Festival Experience studio, I focused on reading the sections of students who documented their design and marketing processes. In particular, I was inspired by Leann’s blog post who decided to revolve their design and colour scheme around RMIT’s colours of red, white and black. This made me reflect on our design style which also incorporates these three colours, but does not contain the same intentions of representing RMIT. Looking back, I would have liked to incorporate something into our festivals design that pays homage to both RMIT and Cerise, who have both made this studio possible and very interesting. Additionally, a key insight I have gained from observing the production process of MIYFF, is that keeping a consistent colour scheme and design style across all aspects of production is of critical importance to attract the public’s attention. I believe that this is something we have successfully done for our festival this year.

More so, reflecting on the 2021 Melbourne Overlooked Film Festival (MOFF), which also happens to be my very first online film festival experience, I was very impressed with how the team was able to shift to an online setting with only a few weeks left before their festival was meant to run. As I really admired the visuals they created for all their advertising material, I was eager to read about their process of establishing the festivals design which included the moth as their logo, and what had ultimately inspired them to generate this theme of showcasing overlooked films. Furthermore, a key insight I gained from MOFF’s blog posts is that having a contingency plan is very important to ensure we can effectively respond to any possible disruptions in the future. This is also something that Cerise has stressed to us in-class several times, that having a back-up plan is crucial for responding promptly to any unforeseen events that may arise.

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