As the Managing Director of DIFF, my main task throughout this process was venue acquisition for our three-day event. Once our venue(s) were secured, to avoid doubling up on information and to keep communication streamlined between our team and the venue managers, I continued to act as the liaison between us. Any questions DIFF-lomats had regarding venues came through me and vice versa.
As a team, we settled on two final locations. The Capitol at 113 Swanston Street, was to be our opening night venue. And RMIT’s the Kaleide Theatre would host us for the preceding two nights.
From the beginning, The Capitol were very easy to deal with. I introduced myself and spoke regularly with Darren Brown (Venue Manager) via email. Once I explained what we were hoping to achieve, he laid out all costs associated with hire, such as front of house staff, security, and a projectionist which I could then reiterate to our Finance Director (Jordan Chetcuti). Darren also provided me the 2023 Capitol Tech Specs which aided our Technical Director (Lachlan Campbell) in his pre-production planning, and informed DIFF’s Programming Team on the types of files they would need to not only order through the film distributors, but also collect from the Film Freeway short film submissions. Roughly halfway through our communications, Darren took annual leave and handed things over to Bec Bartlett. As Bec came onboard toward the business end of our event, she and I spoke almost daily. Coordinating elements such as holding slides for intermission, speeches, merchandise, and candy bar operations, delivery of film files and their testing, even items that were needed such as trestle table set ups and a lectern on stage in preparation for welcoming speeches. This was all information I would then take back to the team, for example, the design team who would then need to create holding slides based on the specs given to us.
Initially, The Kaleide proved a tricky venue to acquire. I made various inquiries, filling in the online venue information form on RMIT’s own website, speaking with the tech desk in the media precinct, until eventually I had to hunt down the venue managers own email and phone number and start continuously emailing and leaving voicemails. Finally, success! I had a response, but again, this proved to be a back-and-forward venture. Hiring the Kaleide required an RMIT staff member to make the request, we then had to hire security separately which again, needed to be organised via a member of staff. So much of my time here, was spent liaising between Venue Manager Marc Morel, and Studio Leader, Cerise Howard. Once these details were sorted though, organising a tour of the space for myself and a various other key team members was easily manageable. Once we had made those connections and followed those processes, emailing between myself and Marc in preparation for the event was a breeze. We acquired event information sheets, and similarly to the communications between myself and The Capitol, we went on to organising the finer details of our event needs at The Kaleide.
Please see samples of email threads below;
What I did in my debut at the festival was manage the social media platform. SU and I run TIKTOK, and we have some video content planned. We shot and edited all the videos ourselves. We have updated more than 30 original videos in total, from the preparation stage of the festival, to the interview of the members, to the warm-up of the festival, to the trailer and some live videos of the festival. We got over 300 likes and 21 followers. We got about 10,000 views in total.
My contribution to our Debut International Film Festival is posting content on a Chinese social media platform, Little Red Book.