Writing up a press release wasn’t familiar to me before joining the DIFF copywriting team, so naturally, I had my doubts when given the job. Soon, it all came together with help from the programming and production team, who ensured that the film programme was set in stone, as well as the venues for hire before releasing any details.
Prior to writing up the piece itself, fellow DIFF copywriter Maya and I were tasked with writing up a list of media outlets and their contact details in preparation for sending out the final piece. Our studio leader Cerise Howard was of great help, sourcing emails of her personal contacts who may be interested in our festival. Finding appropriate contacts proved to be a more difficult task than we expected and were met with generic publication emails or enquiry forms. Fortunately, we managed to put together a generous list of contacts linked to film culture at Melbourne radio stations and publications. We also compiled a list of the RMIT Media Program staff, mostly Cinema Studies tutors whose classes we’d previously taken, as well as MIFF contacts, thanks to Cerise.
Lachlan of the programming team wrote up a final plan of the event, which was a great reference for writing the order of the program, venues, when and where food and drinks were available, and any other important event details. I hadn’t seen any of the films in the program beforehand, so initially wasn’t too sure how to begin writing about them. For our Opening Night screening of The Hunger (1983), I figured that name-dropping the star-studded cast and noting the film’s themes of erotica and vampirism would attract the right audience – and news of our event made its way to Rochelle at ArtsHub, who published an article on DIFF. Hooray – we’ve got media coverage! As for the other films, DIFF programmer Peter was of great help, knowing about the films and their content. Maya added her magic touch by weaving our mission through the piece, and once tickets went on sale, off the press release went! We received a handful of kind replies with a few sad declines to our DIFF invitation, but Rochelle’s article was a great success from the media release.