This was the second last week for this semester, and we were glad to see that the final version of first NNIFF has emerged. The entire class has been working as a professional production team almost throughout the whole semester, which is something I have never experienced before. The Covid-19 pandemic has become one of the biggest challenges for the film industry, many film festivals were postponed and thousands of filmmakers had to slow down. However, it is somehow considered as the golden era of the online film festival, that is where NNIFF originally came from. The purpose of holding an online film festival is not trying to replace traditional film festivals, it aims to maintain the continuity of the festival culture during this cruel period of time. So, why NNIIFF? The key concept of NNIFF is the way we adapt to “new normal”, we try to deliver the positive attitude that people should not be afraid of the pandemic, and we are actually able to revive the aesthetics of festival culture.
At the start of the production, I was assigned to the Marketing and Publicity team with Polina, Bronte, and Yiran. I was pretty confident due to the fact that I had a lot of working experience for running social media accounts. From my perspective, in-time communication plays a vital role in boosting the production process. Therefore, I created a group chat on Messenger among team members so that we could ensure the efficiency of the idea exchange. Meanwhile, because we need to manage several social media accounts at the same time, it is compulsory for us to have a well-structured timetable due to the fact that different contents can be used for different platforms, and it is essential for us to clarify them. With a cohesive timetable, we could arrange each post effectively. Moreover, in order to ensure the accuracy of post-making, we decided to assign each person in charge of one specific platform, so I am running our official Twitter account currently. Finding resources is also the key to a successful promotion. When we tried to send out the press release, we created a spreadsheet on google drive in order to have a list of organizations that we want to reach out, the use of shared file boosted the efficiency of finding resources. Also, before sending to those potential partners, we sent to each team member first to ensure our professionality on behalf of NNIFF, which reflects the fact that team effort makes the production smoothly.
As a team member of the marketing and publicity team, I am mainly focusing on Twitter right now, but we did not have this sort of allocation at first. From my perspective, various communications outreach plays a significant role in elevating the publicity, especially for NNIFF as an online film festival. Therefore, I mapped out some of the marketing strategies for different platforms. For Facebook, I came up with the strategy of doing Q&A with team members from NNIFF, which provides a sense of closeness between the production team and people. As we have been doing well in marketing, people from the operations team found difficulties in finding sponsors. Therefore, I contacted RCSA (RMIT Chinese students and Scholars Associations) and some Chinese students unions from other universities in order to seek sponsors. The experience of negotiating with people strengthen my understanding of the film festival production. Also, being adaptable is the stepping stone for entering the industry. Even though I was assigned as a marketing person because managing social media accounts are something I am good at, I still want to step out of the comfort zone and try different roles during production so that I could gain more experiences from the first NNIFF.
