Reflecting on my experience of having mounted a film festival from scratch, my knowledge on organising and understanding what constitutes as film festival culture has significantly increased. The Séance International Film Festival (SIFF) is something that I am very proud to of participated in and is an experience that I will cherish throughout my future endeavours. Conceiving and mounting SIFF was a huge accomplishment and relied heavily on teamwork to drive its success. Working collaboratively with an amazing group of talented people who brought different skill sets and backgrounds to the table, is ultimately what enabled us to bring our festivals mission to life.
Working in the design and marketing team, our group was responsible for overseeing all creative aspects of SIFF’s production, including the construction of our visual identity, branding, promotional materials, merchandise, and managing the many facets of acquiring publicity. Specifically, my role was to manage, monitor and implement social media strategies for SIFF’s content in order to increase our brand awareness and establish an online community. With this, I believe I understood the importance of my role and worked effectively to manage our festivals social platforms on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. As a result, our festival was able to form a communication basis with various audiences and receive a diverse selection of short films from countries worldwide. More so, to further succeed in my role, I ensured that I spent time outside of class to conduct independent research on ways that could further promote and support our film festival. For instance, I noticed that many businesses and festivals of all sorts were creating giveaway posts that offered prizes to audiences relevant to their brand. With further research on this strategy, it was clear that running a giveaway contest could heighten our engagement and award us with a significant amount of new audiences. Moreover, SIFF’s giveaway post had been our most engaged with post on social media.
As the studio prompt states that ‘running a festival no matter its proportions, is a consuming undertaking’, organising SIFF had definitely been an intense and demanding process that required the dedication and contribution from everyone involved. A huge success of our festival has been the ability of everyone to communicate effectively and work collaboratively in specialised groups. As described by Kuhn (2015, p. 79), ‘the success of your festival depends very much on the team that organises it.’ As we were all able to stay in constant communication and develop an organised workspace for groups to easily access each other’s work, the success of SIFF was in part due to our ability of staying organised and well-structured. We were also able to establish SIFF’s theme and mission very early on in the semester due to our group forming a strong bond. Conversely, I believe that our festivals only shortcoming is that our festival tickets were released too late. I believe that they should have been released much earlier on to allow for the marketing and socials team to have more time in promoting the ticket sales. Additionally, audiences could also of had more time to spread the word and alter their schedules in advance to attend our event. Thus, increasing the attendance of SIFF. Moreover, this is something to definitely take into consideration for future practices if SIFF were to continue running in the future.
According to Peranson (2008), he states in his article First You Get The Power, Then You Get The Money, how film festivals provide audiences with the opportunity to see films that they cannot or will most likely never see. This perception was very important to consider during the production of our festival, as SIFF’s main ideology was to showcase a multicultural array of horror films that expand beyond borders of the Western media-sphere. With the many international films we received from countries such as Italy, Japan and Spain, I believe we successfully offered our audiences a unique selection of films that they’d most likely of never been able to see in their lives.
More so, in How to Successfully Promote Your Festival, Rambouskova (2015) states that newly launched festivals must contact and prove to the media that they are professional organisations, as opposed to just waiting on the media to find our festivals and become familiar with their existence. This was a very important insight to consider when working in the design and marketing team, as it was ultimately our responsibility to establish an identity, gain visibility, and form a relationship with the media. Consequently, I believe SIFF had successfully achieved and gained a significant amount of visibility from the media by our teams hard work and dedication in proving to the media that we are a ‘professional organisation with well-prepared materials and a well-designed identity’ (Rambouskova 2015, p. 98).
Furthermore, the media studio I chose to engage with is Future Machina. I was very impressed with Holly Colvin’s piece titled ‘The Road to Eternal Life’, which aims to explore the idea of human preservation and immortality. I particularly like how her piece is filmed in a first-person point of view which further portrays her characters world in a futuristic and artificial-like perspective. I also found her overall concept to be very engaging, as she aims to utilise advanced technology to assist humans with detecting risk and disease in their daily lives. More so, I believe Holly’s piece successfully engages with the studios core concept, which is to explore the ideology of futurology through a particular media form.
References
Kuhn, A 2015, ‘Who Is Organising It? Importance of Production and Team Members’, Setting Up a Human Rights Film Festival, vol. 2, Human Rights Film Network, Prague, pp. 71-83.
Peranson, M 2008, ‘First You Get the Power, Then You Get the Money: Two Models of Film Festivals’, Cineaste, vol. 33, pp. 37-43.
Rambouskova, B 2015, ‘How to Successfully Promote Your Festival’, in Setting Up a Human Rights Film Festival, vol. 2, pp. 97-114.