As noted in a previous blog post, the idea of celebrating filmmaking firsts came about through ideation of festival themes. Cerise noted that the horror genre is what brought together last year’s Festival Experience studio, and an appreciation for the underappreciated for the 2021 studio. What is it that brings this year’s studio together? Was there ever an idea or theme congruous to the group, or did it simply come down to a vote? I think it was mostly the latter, as time was not on our side, and we had to get cracking. Although, when Jordan put out the idea of first times in film, ideas of marketable festival names came about. I recall mentioning the word ‘debut,’ and Ben of the programming team suggesting the title ‘dawn’. Soon following this brainstorm was the dawn of the Debut International Film Festival, with some more on board with the choice of ‘Debut’ in the title than others. We were all on board with the theme itself, and I think we’ve managed to put together something to be proud of.
A set of departments were built, and many either played to their strengths by filling roles that they were familiar with or decided to take a challenge by exploring something different. I was somewhere in between the two, as I wasn’t familiar with copywriting before this semester, but taking a class in professional writing complimented my role as a copywriter for DIFF. I’ve been fortunate to work with Maya, a very talented writer who writes copy for an independent media house. I’ve learnt a lot from Maya and have been able to communicate with her really well across the semester, primarily via Messenger, where we could exchange feedback on our individually written pieces and check in to see how we were feeling about our progress for any assigned tasks. Despite divvying up the work where needed, we still met in the middle and ensured that DIFF’s ethos was present in the work, and that the writing was easily accessible.
Much of our work involved liaising with other departments, from writing up a call for submissions to proofreading descriptions of ticketed events. I worked a lot with the lovely Jordan, DIFF’s Finance Director, and jack of all trades. Jordan and I drafted a sponsorship package together, which I finished off and sent through to the graphic design team to jazz up for potential sponsors. There’s been a great deal of cross-networking, which is great, because it’s clear that we’re working as a team and not solely as separate departments. We initially thought we might have to outsource graphic designers and videographers, but people within the festival team gave it a go, with Tarsila creating an eye-catching logo symbolic of our theme, and the social media team filming fun content across the semester.
Once we were notified of permission grants for screening films at DIFF, the programme started coming together, allowing Maya and I to start filling the pages in our program booklet. I believe our job originally entailed writing up synopses and researching film data to be provided to the booklet designers, but the task of booklet designing fell in our hands, and it soon became a project we poured a lot of passion into. We came across a template for a company handbook on Canva with a font and style that caught our eye and personalised it to DIFF’s colour palette. Researching other film festivals and their program booklets informed the making of our own, with the Europa! Europa! Film Festival booklet being a source of inspiration for the DIFF booklet – from its placement of location, event dates and tagline on the front cover, to the pages dedicated to short and feature films. Printing, binding, and distributing the booklets was another task entirely, with few people available to help before Opening Night. When the printers were kind to us, we managed to print out a handful of booklets in preparation for the event and for distribution in media spaces on campus. Having a physical copy of a project we’ve worked so hard on and being able to share it with other people is truly rewarding, and I’m proud of our contribution to DIFF’s first edition.