The program booklet was something that we had to start thinking about early into the semester but wasn’t finalised until the week before the festival. Cerise encouraged us to look through other film festival booklets to generate ideas as to what ours would and wouldn’t include, as other more established festivals had pages that were not pertinent to ours, such as dedicated pages to multiple venues and the times showing. The program wasn’t finalised until the last couple of weeks so it was difficult to piece it together as there were many moving parts, and lots of liaising with different departments such as the program team, the production team etc.
As the graphic design team were already busy designing the logo and creating social media pages, the copywriting group (consisting of myself and Amy) took it upon ourselves to do it. Using Canva, we found a template with big, blocky colours similar to DIFF’s colour palette of yellow, pink and orange. We loved the look of it, being very modern, fun and eye-catching, so we tweaked it to fit our vision of our program, including our logo, the dates of the festival, our slogan and our socials. We included the various sponsors that we had to acknowledge their contribution to our festival, as well as a table of contents. We had a short production team welcome, which we hoped would bring a personal touch to whoever read it, and let them know that we were real people behind this who were super passionate about the project.
Our synopsis for our feature films took whole pages, whereas we had so many short films, we had to put two to a page. The layout was clean, and we tried to put as many data points as possible (such as the director, location, languages, classification etc.) Lastly, as there were various ticketing prices for each day, we found it easier to put up a QR code to our Eventbrite page, so people could easily scan and see the prices. Printing and distributing was also very last minute, as we didn’t have much manpower to help us print and disperse them on campus. However, I’m still very proud of the final product, and I think it’s a great physical memento of what our festival was.