These last few weeks leading up to MIYFF’s debut have been manic. Everybody is trying to organise whatever last minute things needed to be done. Things like: printing and folding several copies of the festival programs, thinking how to decorate Backlot Studios (if needed) and RMIT Building 80.

At this point, we needed to get more sales especially for the Saturday matinee session considering that session had the least amount of sales. To my knowledge, I think we had only sold 6 tickets for the session the week of the festival. That was a serious concern because we had some of the filmmakers attend and have a Q&A at the end. This was for those who were considering pursuing a career in the industry, receive an insight as to what it takes to put together a short film and share their experiences being in the industry.

Our programs were finally ready to be printed and distributed around. So a number of us decided to meet up at the Carlton Library to use our printing credit to print these programs and distribute them around campus and hand them out to friends to persuade them to attend. I was involved in that process and placed some of our programs in RMIT Building 108 because VCE is there. I thought it’d be good idea to put them there because any VCE students who were keen on studying media in university could gain insight about the industry.

I decided to help Megan with planning out how to decorate and arrange the area outside the cinema room in Building 80. We felt like that it was odd that there was ticketing booth for that cinema room but it could be seen if you entered from A’Beckett Street, not from Swanston Street. It would have been the perfect place to sell the food and drinks. So we decided to come up with an alternative idea where we have a table outside the cinema entrance for food & drinks. We would also decorate the stairs leading down to the cinema entrance with our posters and create a small photo wall with our posters & fairylights as the backdrop.

Communication between everybody was pretty good. We mostly communicated via our group page, but sometimes it felt like we weren’t getting much of a response from everybody. Which was crap during times when we needed help. Example: we agreed with having 2 sessions for program making & distributing. Some people said they’d help distribute programs after 2pm and nobody showed up for that.