First of all, I want to congratulate our film festival for its successful completion. And thank for all the team’s contribution for this film festival. I have to admit that this semester seems to be involved in a wonderful journey in the field of the festival, and I have to say that this experience will be a perfect and inspirational experience during my life. Next, I will divide it into several specific sections to summarize my achievement of different aspect in the process of operating a real film festival.

Preparation

Prior to attending the first MIYFF, I only attended a screening at the opening night of the Shanghai International Film Festival. At that time, I had only a very basic understanding of the film festival – it was a platform for different film shows. For example, the Shanghai International Film Festival, founded in 1993, is hosted by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television and the Shanghai Municipal People’s Government, and is hosted by the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Culture, Radio, Film and Television and the Shanghai Culture, Radio, Film and Television Group. Although I participated in the film festival, I am still a newcomer in the field of the film festival. After I came to Melbourne, I was very surprised to find that I will hold a youth film festival with my new classmates this semester. When I heard about this information, my first reaction was very surprised and excited. But after I learned what it would take to hold a film festival, I started to have some concerns. Fortunately, this concerns is slowly being eliminated and reduced due to everyone’s concerted efforts in the later time.
Teamwork
“It is only after having breathed the festival atmosphere and become one with its rhythms that we can begin to grasp our love for them” (de Valck, 2016, Pg. 9) Only when we have personally experienced how to really organize a film festival can we realize the full charm of it. One fascinating thing about staging MIYFF was establishing workflows and communication between a group of people who barely know each other at all. I think everyone in the class is doing very well. From the beginning, spreadsheets and Google Docs were created to track each person’s roles and responsibilities, and we even set up our own private MIYFF Facebook team to update the progress of each group in the class. Establish clear communication structures is an important thing when we plan to hold a film festival. “Like music festivals, film festivals should realise that, especially in the age of online, it’s the offline communality of film festivals, the fact that we are all getting together to do the same thing, that is part of the source of their joy” (M. Cousins, 2012) It’s really a pleasure to get together to work on a film festival. The more everyone knows about their responsibilities on the team, the fewer errors there are. If something goes wrong, you will be better prepared to respond better. Although no one can know everything, everyone should know who has what information and how to contact them directly when necessary. Seriously speaking, teamwork and division of labor are one of the main contents of my course.

Trailer skills

During the creation of the trailer, we encountered many difficulties, but in the end we all tried our best to solve it. I started to know that a good trailer is not how interesting or complicated you are to shoot, instead you should apply some simple shootings and words to directly catch audience eyes so that attracting them to attend our film festival. The most time and effort I spend in my work is brainstorming. Because at the beginning we wanted our Chinese trailer to be full of mystery. Our first idea was to have a mysterious man throwing a paper plane – a paper plane made with our posters to attract boring people. But in the end, because of the wind direction and other issues, it could not be completed. By talking to other team members and receiving a lot of suggestions, we ended up with another simple and straightforward Chinese trailer. I have to thank our actors here because they just got off the plane and put themselves into our shooting. I want to cheer for our friendship here.

Festival Days

For beginners, MIYFF’s opening night will sell itself as an event, but in my opinion, it is far more than this, it has become a social center and an avid movie fan and people just want to have a good time. The place of common interest of the night. We want our film festival to be more than just a professional platform for young filmmakers to showcase their movies. We also want to let participants feel the exclusive culture that belongs to our film festival. In addition, we hope that they can feel our dedication and expectation for this film festival. First of all, I want to say that the destination choice of the opening night of our film festival is very good. There is a small bar there, which allows the audience to have a place to stay before the movie was played, and allowed our staffs to have the opportunity to Introduce our festival to them before the movie. What I have to mention here is that my cake idea has been admitted by many of my classmates. When I walked into the venue with the cake, some classmates even screamed, and I was very touched for this. The night was comprised of drinks, chatter, nibbles and a very wholesome setting. What’s more, the film we chose was indeed recognized. After the end of the movie, audiences tasted the delicious cake and discussed about our film festival, I was immersed in happiness. I think all of my class would have the same feeling as me.
Next, let us review the second day of the film festival. I have not been able to participate in the activities of the next afternoon for some reasons. But listening to my friend, the atmosphere of the afternoon is not as good as the night yesterday. I think this is not a problem with our film, maybe it is the reason for the venue, because we have limited funds and can only change the venue to the cinema of RMIT. This shows that it is really important to choose a good venue. Another reason may be that the opening night has different meanings, which is why we sold more tickets on the opening night. The RMIT Building 80 are not as spacious as the Backlot studio. Maybe we didn’t take this into consideration when borrowing space, so there was almost no space dedicated to creating a beautiful and enthusiastic Pre-holiday environment.

Conclusion

Most of us hold an event for the first time in two days (not to mention the holiday) – this is something I have never done before. I do believe that studios can get the most out of many of us, far more than any previous studio we participate in. Furthermore, thanks to all the support and cooperation of the MIYFF team, MIYFF has achieved great success and I am proud to say that I am involved. I learned a lot during the film festival.

Improvement and imagination

On the day when the festival ended, I had a feeling that I was not willing to end. It was like a dream, but I never thought that it would end so soon. There is a regret that I want to mention here. Because in the beginning of the schedule, I saw that we are going to make 500 tote bags which typed our name MIYFF. Therefore, I highly recommend it to my friends in China, and many of them have the intention to buy. I think the Tote bag is very practical, and when we put our logo on it, people who carrying it is like a walking “advertisement”. This gives me a sense of pride that MIYFF really gets out of Melbourne and even Australia. But when I wanted to buy it on the day of the film festival, I got to know that because of the limited funding, our team did not make a Tote bag in the end, and I had to admit that I had a slight loss in my mind at that time. I really hope that the Tote bag can be made in the next film festival. I am here to guarantee that I will definitely buy it and use it haha. In addition, there were some minor accidents during our screening, but I thought it was inevitable in the first experience, so we don’t have to take it too seriously.
Finally, I want to thank our teacher, Cerise again. It is her constant encouragement to let us keep going on and to complete our film festival dreams. She are really a very good teacher. When we encounter some difficulties and problems, she will give us some good suggestions in time to help us solve it.

Reference：

Mark Cousins, “Film Festival Form: A Manifesto” on “The Film Festival Academy” website, accessed 12 April, 2019.

Marijke de Valck, “Introduction: What is a film festival? How to study festivals and why you should” in Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell and Skadi Loist (eds), Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, Routledge, New York, 2016, pp. 1-11.

In the past two weeks, our preparations are continuing in an orderly manner. Every time we calm down and reflect, we will be surprised to find that we have only completed so many things in just over twenty people. This really shows how powerful people are.

Because of Rohan’s feedback last time, we decided to take a new Chinese trailer again. On the day of the shooting, because our actor was a classmate in Sydney, her plane landed in Melbourne at four o’clock in the afternoon. This caused our shooting to end until about 11 o’clock in the evening. You can’t even imagine how simplistic our conditions are. Because of the problem of lighting, we can only let our friends take out the lamps at home and give us a light. But fortunately, when we finally finished the new trailer and showed it in the classroom, I was affirmed and I am proud of myself. Through this experience, I found that when everyone has their own specific roles and focuses on their tasks, work becomes easier. I think this course will be a valuable lesson for the future.

When I was in class last week, the teacher also arranged for us to go to building 80 to survey the terrain, and think about how to decorate it on the day of the festival, so as to attract more people to pay attention to our film festival. I now have an idea that is simple and easy to get. I want to make a cake engraved with the name of our film festival and celebrate our film festival. I also mentioned this idea to the teacher in class. My teacher thought it was a good idea and encouraged me to finish it.

At the beginning of this semester, I really thought that holding a film festival was an unreachable dream for me. But this dream is really going to happen now, and my excitement is hard to express clearly in words.

Today is a very busy day. First of all, our teams need to introduce our project to studio leaders —-filmmaker Rohan Spong and Erin Rosenberg, the coordinator of the Jewish International Film Festival. After the introduction, the two leaders gave very good and comprehensive opinions. All the experiences have given me the feeling that our film festival is on the right track.

Instagram posts have a nice aesthetic but could use a bit more color. Tessa explained to them what the red, white and black represent in the picture. But Rohan still thought the colors have some monotony and hopes that more colors can be applied to the images. Then we saw the posters, and they thought that there were too many words in the poster. The role of the poster should be simple and concise. The design team is ready to make some changes, enlarge the picture, and leave only the name, time and place of our film festival.

Then we saw the trailer. Chinese Trailer – is committed to attracting more Chinese students to participate in our film festival. We created two videos of young Chinese students talking about the festival and expressing their interest in going. But one of them was because the actor was not completely relaxed and put into the shooting. We should choose to give up this trailer. But on the other hand, Rohan said that it can be applied, it directly and accurately reflects the role of propaganda. English cinematic trailer—-The final outcome was cute, cheesy and had a satirical feel to the “overly-cinematic” style, but unfortunately, the panel was not to keen on the idea and thought it best to pull away from the parody/satirical style, which may alienate our audience. Although there are many places in our work that need to be revised, we have to say that each of us is working hard to prepare for our film festival.