Week 11 comes to an end and we are about to enter the last week of classes and our fate of the festival is upon us! This is not bad news at all, i myself am very excited and proud of every department for doing their best to balance classes, assignments and everyday life to promote this magnificent experience. In this week we mainly focused on film festivals all around the world to (since the beginning of our brainstorming to now)get motivation and experience from their websites, booklets and promotional material (social media). This initiative was very interesting to conquer as in reality, we did this at the start of our journey by follow the Séance International Film Festival which was the program held last year at RMIT. Their mission statement, rules and film freeway were a very big influence in our design, aim and point of view, we both believed in the same way of thinking but we had different focuses in the films of the festival. As for the design of their website, our reaction was in awe for some reason, we questioned how they did it, surely they paid someone to do it? But no they didn’t. A key positive of film freeway to me is that you can browse so many film festivals all around the world from the present to the past and see their mission, rules, submissions and even more information which eventually helped us to create our mission statement and rules. One thing that we all learnt from is that we are a new festival, no one knows us, so unlike film festivals that charge a lot more money than usual, we had to discount our priority and focus more on quantity and gamble with quality which the short films we got are extraordinary! Another festival that i got a booklet off of was the Birrarangga film festival 2023. This booklet celebrates indigenous films from across the globe and happened during March. This booklet is special amongst other booklets as it emphasises slightly our mission statement of commemorating the indigenous people for one. This booklet rather than just showing what is presented in the film festival, it shows a complete calendar of the festival exposing talks, feature films, short films along with dates and times and locations colour coded on a easy read timeline.

In week 10, urgency is all over us, we are getting closer and closer to the deadline and our release of our festival to the whole world. Our film freeway submissions are buzzing, our feature films are getting locked in and it looks like we are somewhat known around the film community. In this week, we got exposed like other weeks to our inspiration of past year festival experience experiences, more specifically, The Séance International Film Festival(SIFF). This festival was a year before us and they did a magnificent job and we want to replicate their expertise and positives as much as possible. SIFF promotes the use of horror as a formula to guarantee their audiences with a haunted and spooky time, their promotion of the festival especially with their trailer completely changed my mind on how we are doing this. As i watched the trailer they made, my imagination was lowered, how did they come up with this? Its so simple but it looks so professional. I realised that we needed to make use of that we are at RMIT University and that we needed to take advantage of our incentives at the University. The one thing that struck me with the SIFF team was that their social media and their website was extremely highly regarded from myself and my peers. The trailer and their theme was so easily construct and their website looked so professional, we didn’t know how a bunch of students could do such a thing. Another thing i wanted to touch on was that the members of the festival took advantage of their people that they knew, for example, their fundraiser. A student worked at a bar in Fitzroy and promoted a collaboration in order for a free venue hire and guaranteed money to fund the festival in a trivia night. Speaking shortly on the 2021 class, the Melbourne Overlooked Film Festival (MOFF) explored the opportunity of short films which we liked the idea of and we split our program into features and shorts alongside one another. The group also did well (and inspired myself as well) as they went on a film podcast called ‘Another Bloody Movie Podcast’ which could be areally opening and positive idea for more audience and acknowledged in the film world.

Week 8 was just like other weeks but closer to the deadline. In this week for myself, in the programming team, we split up into two groups, one for feature films and one for short films. Myself, Peter and Ben will present feature films and our ideas for our future presentation to three MIFF workers. The readings this week were actually pretty interesting and insightful to myself as both readings promoted our vision into what we wanted to accomplish. In the first reading, Cousins’ manifesto he creates about film festival was very insightful to myself as last semester i studied film manifesto’s so it was pretty easy and enjoyable to understand what he was saying and what his point of view was and why he was doing it(plus all the exclamation marks). A thing about this reading was some things i liked but also some things i didn’t resemble with. For example “no red carpets at film festivals” i think our festival should have one, i feel like we want to promote our festival and show everyone having fun, especially us creators who made it. Something that gave me hope and excitement was that he stated that the people who create and lead the festivals should “think of themselves as storytellers and stylists”. I want our festival to follow this, i want creativity and something no one is expecting, something like a gallery, everyone in awe other than the films of course. I feel like this reading in the class was brought up multiple times as a way of inspiration especially amongst us programmers, we talked about it and we thought it was really interesting how his manifesto was really different to our visions and we wondered if we are doing it the right way, should we abandon our approach? Listen to him? This piece was problematic in a good way and helped us eventually adapt our knowledge of film festivals, its not just a cinema viewing its definitely way more, more articulate to it.

Week 7 was an absolute phenomenon for our film festival. In this week, a lot happened, unlike other weeks, this week gave us a reality check, we have basically 5 weeks to go until we premiere and we need to get a move on but we have got more positives than negatives for ourselves. By ‘soft launching’ our festival in class we opened our festival to the world of filmmakers all over the world via Film Freeway. I, myself, designed and curated the film freeway website and it was easy than i expected but hard to remember certain things. We had to include rules, deadlines of the early bird which would be cheaper, normal deadline and a late deadline we had to delete as the timing was off (loss of potential profits). One thing that i think was hard for us was that with Australian currency it is much cheaper for the global world to submit films and it was surprising to me that as soon as we launched we got around 10 in the first two days of submitting our festival across the website. Although some submissions were $2 as our currency was off (and we could’ve given us USD but we didn’t)we got money and it will grow as time goes by. By promoting our film freeway via posters and potential videos and social media posts, we look forward to an uprise in popularity amongst Melbourne, the country Australia and even the global world due to our submissions. One thing i wanted to add quickly was that one of our firsts submissions was all the way from Romania, this gives me hope. Moving onto the video essay ‘Screening Room: on digital film festivals’ it really made me realise and somewhat question reality for a secon when she played John Berger’s ‘Way’s of Seeing’ (1972). Her explanation alongside this video gives us hope for pandemic film festivals, cinemas are just like famous paintings, they are known for the one place to be held (cinemas, in this case) but they can be seen in this video, on your phone, on the other side of the world (in your house). Moving onto a reading in this weeks class that enthused me into thought and idea was Ed Meza’s piece ‘While Missing Cinemas, Festival programmers See Silver Lining in Online Screenings’. In this piece Meza gives his promotion of IFFR during COVID lockdowns around the world a positive outcome rather than a flat out disappointment. Meza states that they found that in online screenings there was more “niche…ways to reach audiences, even geographically” which gave them more “widespread” activity all across the world in one session. This means that a film festival online can get a much more larger audience than a physical in case someone is sick, overseas, misses the session or something along those lines.

In week 6 of this quickly paced studio we have been bombarded in a good way of content, feedback and opportunities with people from MIFF, readings and our lecturer. However, this week was in high importance for myself and my programming team as we had a MIFF programmer Kate Fitzpatrick. A programmer in a festivals’ role is to go after the viewing that the audience watches. Programmers take care of the type of film, they take care of the shipping, contacts and the overall tone of short films, features or whatever is being broadcasted. With the help of Kate Fitzpatrick, we learnt that programming is not easy, its actually rather difficult. A special moment i remember and gained insight from was her enthusiasm with our mission and our approach to promote and push for diversity amongst film festival. This explains our ideas of what type of films we want, we don’t want just American men, we want women, global cinematic debut masterpieces. Moving away from the guest lecture, in this week, we produced our own budget and timeline. In the budget we proposed in each of our teams; programming, production, social media team, marketing and more that we all needed a timeline of what we needed to accomplish by a deadline. This was very stressful but sort of the opposite too as we had a lot to do but we all had the capability to ensure we could do it by a specified time and the list will go shorter and shorter as time will go by. Unlike the timeline, we were challenged by the budget of our whole pre production and costs of everything we needed to cover. Starting off with $0 it will always be a challenge, thanks to RMIT we got a donation to keep our hopes up and confidence. In the budget we were speculating and guessing most of it and overpricing cause in the future we knew it would be more satisfying seeing the reality of the prices we get to our expectations which would be quite cheaper than what we guessed.

By reading and analysing festival reports the knowledge of film festivals all around the world grows stronger and the promotion of usefulness and ideas begin to endeavour into my brain. Cerise’s 56th Karlovy Vary’s experience to me was very interesting to hear  and her experience of a massive film festival we hear plenty about was fun to explore. Cerise stars the report by examining the opening ceremony which to me through the photos looked like a full on festival, the description of it through “exuberant, pyrotechnical display of song-and-dance” implemented in my brain that at our festival anything is possible if we want to ‘wow’ our audience and it did feel that Cerise was ‘wowed’ by the choreographed dancing and performance. Another thing that Cerise points out is Karlovy Vary’s “East to the West” idea, i thought in my opinion could be a possible opportunity for our film festival for anyone who experienced war or something to “aid filmmakers from the former Eastern bloc to emerge out of the region’s political indoctrinated isolation” on the levels of “institutional and Psychological”. We can promote a specific area of the world as we want to show diversity rather than one country throughout the whole festival. Moving on, Cerise’s film festival experience through the films she watched she explains that films were “ambitious”, “overcooked” and how a specific film was “a compact yet unhurried delight unafraid to expressly position itself in the pandemic-afflicted present day” expresses the creativtiy of the selections of programming films at Karlovy Vary.  The second festival report was Jessica Kiang’s experience a the Berlin Film Festival in which she calls it “The Joy (and Pain) of the Physical, at an In Person Berlin Film Festival. Jessica humorously starts her report by thoroughly examining the covid process the festival had through her experience with the nasal-swab antigen test, she stated that the year before on the online festival was a no go zone. The remote festival “didn’t feel like a festival at all” and that she was extremely happy and “delighted” to see humans at a festival at last through her experience. Kiang breaks down her viewings rigorously by stating that through a “single-location” film, it did good at “acknoweldg(ing) the pandemic without making it the subject of the film”. Kiang finally expresses her thoughts of the films at the festival by stating that these specific films presented were “Uncompromising, coldly provocative drama that gathered no prizes, which is a shame”, “uncategorizable” and that a film was an “exasperatingly overwritten art piece”. Through the help of Cerise Howard and Jessica Kiang’s reports, we basically ourselves got to experience global festivals around the world at past events without attending but through words and their experiences there which instigated my knowledge of film festival in dire need of creativity.

Something that struck me out first from film festivals was how popular they are globally and specifically in Australia. In Stevens’ “a Festival for Every Occasion: Niche Programming, Event Culture and Vertically Integrated Film Festivals’, film festivals from different “ranges” have “multiplied exponentially” and “new events emerging on an almost weekly basis” which made me realise we are in a very big and broad environment into creating a festival creative and not just a repeat of what someone has seen before. I personally( although i don’t have experience with film festivals) would want something that audiences and cinephiles have never seen before and it’s a cliché of course to want this but who would want to come and see a festival made by students and just about things that already happen around them. By establishing a mission of what we discussed in class about providing people passionate for films and cinephiles to come aboard we want a specific audience we want sort of professionals although everyone is welcome of course. We want something new, ‘something DIFFerent’ which is a slogan we came up with which is a really good marketing scheme to draw people in. Our mission is to celebrate filmmakers and celebrate their first works as their debut film to see how far they have come, what has been borrowed overtime and what has been changed through time and experience. Many people don’t watch various directors first films as they don’t really shine out to their greater pieces into what their really know for and no one really has access to these early works, which is why its our job to provide this for them. I found it interesting and very innovative in the reading that the ‘Warrambeen’ Film festival had the “analogy” of the sheep as a way of marketing and i think in order to get bums on seats and approval we need to come up with a cool, smart and intelligent analogy just like theirs. Another things that Stevens talks about in which we should not follow is that film festivals “echo” one another in celebrations and the overall film festival but how can we do this ourselves without echoing but creating our original way of a festival without anything that anyone has seen before. Moving on, in the ‘Bright Young Screens’ reading, i found this reading very easy and indispensable into finding great information about how we go about establishing our festival. The author talks about how we can gain attraction through “setting an unexpected focus on a certain personality or phenomenon” which we did well at as the ‘Debut International Film Festival’ in the phenomenon and personality of debuting our festival for the first time and also at the same time celebrating debut films by directors. One final thing i found helpful was that they told us to actually “go to festivals” and experience the “global trends” at these festivals, i plan to do this and sort of write a list of what i found similar and different and sort of challenge us to incorporate these abilities into our own work.

With the clock running out until our opening night of the Debut International Film Festival (DIFF) the time to create our own schedule and our own roles came to the class. The programming team, the team that has the profession which enables them to pick the films and choose what stands out and is appropriate for the festival. This team stood out to me as my first choice due to the reading of week 3 which was ‘Setting Up a Human Rights Film Festival’ in which it provided us with a “cookbook” for film festivals as a guide to help us students. This reading stood out to me as it broke down each and every role and necessity into providing a vision for our festival to make it as easy as possible. When talking about programming, the reading gave us two roles “programmer(s)” and “program coordinator” which stood out to me as a very big role as i didn’t know that programming involved that many things which was interesting to me. In that role you are responsible for transporting  film which i had the bright idea if for emergencies only if we are running out of money i will put it on my hands that i will drive a long way in order to acquire actual film print if we follow that route. Continuing on, the programming coordinator states that you should “coordinate with another festival” for specific screenings and “excellent organisational skills”  and information in which i myself have never really been involved with film festivals i myself think that Daniel who in our class has been to many and is specifically in the Indonesian Film Festival in Melbourne which he would easily understand due to his many years of experience in this category. Moving on and talking about skill sets, i think its very important that each person from any category but specific categories should focus on communication, i think this is very important as everyone should know what is happening, what has happening and what we want to do in the future, i think the help of discord is great as people can have it on their phone, out and about and if they think of something they can just type it in the chat and hear what anyone wants to say. Communication is key clearly works for us through this application but what we can improve on and adapt with is for people who cant make it to classes, i think we should( as i do with Ben who does not make it sometimes to classes) support and communicate with one another or put it in the general page about what we did in the class, what we need to work on and how long we have left to achieve this.

As each lesson i learn more and more about film festivals i am more introduced to people, cultures, and advantages of skills to continue the quest of hosting our own film festival as a class at the end of the studio. With the help of various expert opinions, myself and my class are at this time enhancing our brains into thinking through an idea for our festival.

The Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) and RMIT are satisfyingly helping us students out by working together to grant us advice on hosting a festival, we had two special guests that helped shape our minds on making a realistic, fun, and entertaining festival.

Firstly, in week one we had a special guest lecture from Mia Falstein-Rush who works for MIFF who established and discussed to us the key aspects of how she herself hosted a film festival from scratch by herself. To myself, making a film festival on my own would be the exact same as being stranded in a desert, to think how successful and how openminded Mia’s festival was really lifted my spirits and the class too, her words influenced my belief that anything we think of is possible. A key belief she showed us is that it’s not how we advertise our festival it’s about how we treat our supporters she told us that we should always treat people and support them as we don’t really want to make enemies in this scene. Furthermore, in our second guest we had Adolfo Aranjuez who also works at MIFF who is in charge of publications and audience development. Adolfo was straight to the point and expressed his opinions easily through marketing. Adolfo told us that our audience are our consumers and that we need to know who we are selling to in order to obtain a profit and make our festival a hit. Moving on, for more research of film festivals i decided to attend one to gain some inspiration. Although i did not make enough time for me to actually attend an event i luckily was able to catch the Japanese International Film Festival which was online. This festival one would think would be boring as it is online however i was extremely surprised. First of all, the biggest takeaway was it was free, meaning very accessible and easy to watch, plus you could watch any film out of the whole festival at any time. Also, many things amazed me like a comment section for the audience to reflect upon the particular film, a note from the director, which was interesting to read, a programmers note on why they chose the film to be in the festival, a photo gallery of the film, English subtitles which made it internationally accessible and watchable. This festival brought irs viewers the ability to a newspaper and gave them trailers to help decide what could be their most preferable watch on the festival.  These takeaways gave myself inspiration for future investments in our festival.

When i first enlisted in this studio i thought it would be an experiment of how a film festival is made and that we would be just following a particular festival and viewing it, but I was extremely impressed with how this will work out. Film festivals to me before this course were just an invisible society. I did not realise the specialty of these events, the celebration of these events and the accessibility and popularity of film festivals. When i thought film festivals i thought a small, communal, and homegrown celebration of specific genres, i didn’t realise after watching Film Spa that the ‘festival’ part of ‘film festival’ is a complete party. Continuing on, the celebrations in the Karlovy Vary film festival was really unique as it combined cultures into one space, and it was the first festival to resume since the second world war which elaborated its excellence on how important and special it was to people. Something that really surprised me about this festival was that it has been one of the oldest and biggest film events in central and eastern Europe. This film festival has been going on internationally since 1948 and continues to become wider and wider to the world. Not only is this film festival popular in Europe but the worlds stars have been in attendance to this place since its start and since 1956 it is regarded to film festival goers as a category A festival meaning it is known and respected as one of the best and gets the honour of its resemblant.

In the present day, film festivals in the film festival world are at an all-time high, from what i knew so far is that many headline films get a debut at A list festivals and if they’re good enough they get a standing applause and if they’re really good these applauses last a while longer than normal implying that they would then produce well in the international release of the film. Film festivals in the past were a little exclusive, as we saw in Film Spa, the issues in the history of the world were very different to how we all treat each other now to an extent. Back in the 50s-90s the cold war was in effect in-between the western world and the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union had an iron curtain movement where they tried to impress the east of Europe including where Karlovy Vary is located which turned their state into a communist regime which did not look good internationally. Overall, during that time many nations were excluded and not preferred for films to be shown, only communist led films were specifically chosen rather than diverse western world films. Finally, the impact of film festivals from the past and present are really more special and principal than we realise especially due to this specific celebration.