As part of the programming team, I helped to set up the FilmFreeway page where we received submissions. I was already familiar with FilmFreeway having used it in past volunteering work with other festivals, but this was the first time I was able to actually set up the page and have control over the administrative side.

Setting up the page was really beneficial in organising a lot of the administrative organisation of Séance as it forced us to work out a lot of the nitty-gritty details of the festival. For example, we quickly had to decide the deadlines for submissions, the submission fee, if we were doing any waivers, as well as the rules for submission (e.g. all films had to be under 40 mins in length, and must have English closed captions) to be able to even set the page up. The page was also vital in securing shorts: something that was very much necessary in establishing the festival!

We ended up extending the deadline when it became apparent we didn’t have the amount of films we wanted by the due date, so I wrote an addendum that was added to the FilmFreeway call for submissions as well as the social media. The decision to extend the deadline was a bit nerve-wracking as FilmFreeway only allows for a deadline to be extended once and we weren’t sure how much extra time we needed, but it turned out to be a great choice. We actually received the majority of submissions in the deadline period, and it gave us much more freedom in selecting our shorts.

Overall, we received 28 total submissions from 11 countries around the world which was really exciting! I think using FilmFreeway to receive submissions really helped us to attract films as it added a sense of legitimacy to Séance as it is also used by Sundance and other festivals of that calibre. It’s also an international site, which helped us in finding submissions outside of Australia. In fact, in the end 18 of our 28 submissions were international which was amazing. Using FilmFreeway also meant that we could be found by filmmakers looking to submit films who didn’t even know about Séance—as evidenced by the man who submitted a film before we had even announced that submissions had opened!

My biggest role in the design and marketing team was the selling and overseeing the tickets for both the festival and the fundraising trivia night. The organising of ticketing was important as it affected the turnout at the SIFF through direct contact with the attendees. Therefore, we had to present the tickets in the least confusing way, taking into consideration the restrictions placed from using a third-party ticketing site. For example, a problem we ran into with Eventbrite was the inability to put individual date and times on different tickets, so we had to make sure it was clear in the description section of each ticket. Although the ticketing layout was changed a couple times over the course of the creation process, the final product is clear and effectively allows people to purchase tickets to the desired session.

This role was not only fun in being able to watch ticket sales but also helped me develop my interpersonal skills as it required thorough communication from all teams to get details and information up on the page, ready to be easily understood by anyone interested in attending the festival. Additionally, it was interesting to navigate a new site and get acquainted with something unfamiliar, which added engaging challenges to the task. For example, adding the promo code that reveals discounted tickets for RMIT Students was an interesting task as I had to figure out how to do it through advanced settings.

Below are screenshots from the dashboard page where I was able to track ticket sales and how much money we were making, which was crucial information for the budget as tickets were a primary source of income. It also allowed us to estimate how many people were coming on each night so we could prepare appropriately for the numbers. As shown in the image, we made a finalised sale of 39 tickets to our fundraising night and 163 tickets for the SIFF through Eventbrite alone!

For the Seance International Film Festival, I am a member of the Communications Team. Using my language advantage, I can speak Chinese, English, Korean, and a little bit of Japanese. So this time I am mainly responsible for Chinese translation. I was responsible for translating the promotional documents written by my colleagues into Chinese. International film festivals are diverse, and translation work is indispensable. There is also a colleague doing translation work with me. One of us is responsible for the translation of traditional Chinese, and the other is responsible for the translation of simplified Chinese.

Translation work seems to be very simple, but it is not so easy. For Chinese people in different regions, such as Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and mainland China. They may not be able to understand each other’s words, so we translated Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. There are big differences between Chinese and English, including the word order and literal meaning of sentences. For example, it would be very strange to have a lot of English literal translations into Chinese, and another way of saying it needs to be converted.

The translation may seem like a small thing, but it is an essential part of a truly international film festival. Bringing together filmmakers and film lovers from around the world.

In addition to translation work, we also need to output the Chinese version of the copy for publicity work. We need to find more audiences, and I help contact Chinese organizations in Melbourne, such as RMIT’s Chinese Student&Scholars Association. Ask them to help promote our Seance International Film Festival in the Chinese community.

Below I have attached the translation work photos.

One of the major tasks I worked on with the communications team was writing the call for submissions. This task was particularly important because the call for submissions was responsible for encouraging people to apply for their films to be presented at the SIFF. Therefore, we needed to ensure that it accurately reflected the types of films we wanted to receive. With the submissions we received, it is clear that our call for submissions was useful in terms of giving us access to the types of films we wanted to display.

The call for submissions was posted on the SIFF’s Film Freeway website and onto our social media platforms. The instagram post is featured below. When writing the call for submissions the communications team collaborated with the programming team to ensure we were accurately representing what films they wanted to display.

https://filmfreeway.com/SeanceFilmFest

According to our marketing strategies, SIFF has established official accounts especially for reaching the Chinese community. The information we published has been translated into Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese in order to cover multiple mainstream Chinese media platforms and serve as many Chinese communities as possible. In this program, we choose Weibo as the primarily Chinese social media platform, and according to our statistics data, SIFF has reached 35K views on Weibo.

Unfortunately, the promotion process on Weibo has been facing many difficulties, mainly due to the censorship of commercial content. However, Weibo is still considered the most important Chinese social media platform because of its authoritativeness and number of users. Therefore, avoiding censorship rules and the AI detection of the keywords are the essential obstacles we overcame. Further, the marketing results on Weibo are not as good as ideal; the collaboration of local Chinese KOL may take a more valuable part and use Weibo as the fundamental.

I am one of the member from the Communication team, mainly responsible for translation. Since we are setting up an international film festival, therefore, it is important for us to include people from all around the world that shares different cultural backgrounds, speaking different languages,etc. And being a multilingual, it is time for us to make good use of our ‘special’ language skills. Therefore, My main role is to translate all the English written information into Traditional Chinese, my aim is to focus on groups of people from Hong Kong (My home country), Taiwan and Macau as the other Asian countries might use Simplified Chinese instead.

The translating process is quite interesting as we have to verbally translate the information that are in the shared documents for English to Traditional Chinese. We will then type them down into the computer for further amendments, in terms of vocabularies and the sentence structure, as it will be quite different from what we speak in everyday life to the actual documenting information. We will also have to make sure that the use of words are appropriate and are formal as we are promoting our film festival to the public and filmmakers.  And after that, our work will shared and used for promoting and advertising purposely the other teams on the Chines-based social media platforms. 

Social Media Content – Jennifer Panopoulos

Throughout my festival experience, one of my roles within the marketing and design team was to maintain, monitor and manage SIFF’s social media accounts. We created accounts on multiple platforms including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok and also Weibo which is a China-based blogging app for our International audiences. Particularly, Facebook and Instagram were our most dominant platforms that received a significant amount of engagement and interaction. We ensured that our socials covered all important aspects regarding SIFF’s mission, program guide, ticketing information and ways that people and businesses could help support us through donations and sponsorships. Additionally, we created a Linktree which is also an effective marketing strategy to direct users to multiple content offerings of SIFF.

Leading up to our festival, it was important that our socials remained active, updated, and all queries were responded to in a timely manner. We kept a consistent theme across our feed to further increase our brand recognition and our overall aesthetic look, which further helped in reaching more potential audiences. They key colours we utilised were red, black and white, which are also evident throughout our festivals logo and other design aspects. Over the course of SIFF’s three-day event, it was also crucial that we interacted with our guests by reposting content and stories that tagged our festivals account. This helped to maximise our reach and chances of being seen by new audiences who could then purchase tickets to attend the following days.

More so, as SIFF aimed at showcasing international horror films, we decided to create a paid advertisement for our call for submissions post on both Facebook and Instagram, to allow for the post to be distributed to across multiple countries and a larger demographic. As a result, we had successfully received films from countries such as Italy, Japan, Spain and the United Kingdom. More so, our boosted post reached over 250k accounts, with our top audience location residing in Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Algeria. Additionally, our overall professional dashboard on Facebook reached over 445k audiences, whereas our Instagram reached over 120k accounts.

Overall, acting as SIFF’s social media manager has made me aware of the ways social media can be used as a communication tool to engage with audiences, provide relevant information to consumers, and increase overall brand recognition by posting content with a consistent theme.

Images are attached that illustrate SIFF’s consistent Instagram feed, the paid advertisement post, and statistics showing the Facebook and Instagram reach attained by SIFF’s social platforms.