Post 1: https://www.mediafactory.org.au/xiangfan-chen/2025/04/10/post-1-_-deeper-…shing-a-festival/

Post 2: https://www.mediafactory.org.au/xiangfan-chen/2025/04/10/a2-post-2/

Post 3: https://www.mediafactory.org.au/xiangfan-chen/2025/04/10/post_3-deeper-re…shing-a-festival/

https://vimeo.com/1074675457?share=copy

In Week 6, we looked at the budget for our media festival in more detail. The sponsership team made a presentation about the venues that they were in contact with, particularly the ACMI. They gave a comprehensive overview of the place, including the technicians, functions, securities, and timelines. As much as how I loved the place, I was also worried about our budget – we only have a thousand dollars sponsored by RMIT, and the place at ACMI requires at least three thousand dollars. This puts a lot of pressure on fund raising events, which we haven’t started planning yet. Considering these factors, I would personally perfer other venues that are cheeper – such as somewhere in RMIT. But as of now, I don’t think we have enough information to make a decision, as we only have two quotes from two different venues.

In my opinion, the process of venue searching could have started earlier, even before our name and mission statements are refined. I know our identity is important, but sometimes we forgot that we have already had a very central, fixed, and clear identity from the very beginning – we are all students from RMIT who are throwing up a media festival as the final assessment for a course. Perhaps this is already enough for us to get quotes from venues. Furthermore, although our identity would also affect the venue that we can choose, I don’t think we need to worry about that too much, considering that we are almost sending the same content to each venue organisor. It’s not like we have to get back to the venues right away. In this way, we could have quotes from more venues at this point, which would be extremely helpful in planning our budgets and fund raisings. It would also be helpful for the social media team, as we can now incorporate the addresses into our posters and advertisements.

Yet, speaking of that, I still think we are at an advanced stage. Although we haven’t decided on the venues, we have most of the other pieces. By the end of  Week 6, almost every team got into the specific hand-on tasks. Our production team has developed a comprehensive timeline for the rest of the semester, including what we need to provide to the social media team, when to film certain interviews, and even our interview questions. We began to have a vision about our final documentary, and we have faith for us that the festival is going to work out prefectly.

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I have enjoyed the previous three weeks in this studio, as we have been doing very practical work, which I enjoyed much more than learning things only off articles and books. Upon this point, I think our team / class has been adapting to things very quickly, and we are sticking to the schedule and making significant progress. More importantly, learning about festival operation from a systematic way let me realise how much mistakes I have made in my previous experience in organising events, which is an idea that very excites me. Last year, I took the role of ‘director’ in two non-profit piano concerts with a very small team of volunteers, where none of us had any knowledge in operating events. Not going to lie, it was a tough journey: Ideas were popping up every minute randomly and we would just grasp onto anything we could – there was no clear distribution of roles, no planning, and we had to just navigate things throughout the way. Although the concerts turned out to be quite successful, we have made so many mistakes throughout the way which had caused a lot of stress amongst us; the learning in this course was therefore very valuable, as I can now clearly see some ways to improve our conduct and skill sets if we were to throw other events in the future.

The first important skill set that I’ve learnt in the previous three weeks was planning. I’ve always believed that the best way of learning is through practice, and as much as this mindset has helped me overcome challenges, it sometimes made me overlook the process of planning. I never realised that coming up with a name and mission statement would be that important, as we used to just call the event ‘non-profit women piano concert’ (which now seems very ordinary and unlively). It also shocked me when I discovered that there is a whole independent department called ‘identity’, which is dedicated to logos, graphics, posters, etc. Identity is important as it is linked to the overall image of the event; for example, constructing a logo means identifying the main colours that can be used for social media posts, as it’s best of these colours to match so we can keep a consistent style. Not having anyone to control the overall identity in my previous team has therefore made our advertisement style inconsistent, which has reduced the level of credibility.

I’ve also learnt the importance of constructing a clear and solid communication structure. According to Carrión et al. (2015), the best structure for organising events is when information can be traced for every team member. Everyone should be as informed as possible, which means that all channels of communication should be accessible, even for people that are in a different department. I really loved the way we used Teams and spread sheets, as we were able to construct main channels and sub-channels, keeping every team independent yet accessible for each other. Only using WeChat for my previous teams now seems to be a big mistake, as it only allows private and enclosed group chats so information would easily get lost.

(526 words)

Reference:

Kulhánková, H., Jong, D., Carrión, M., Eagle, R. (2015). Setting Up a Human Rights

Film Festival, vol. 2. Human Rights Film Network, 83. https://moviesthatmatter.nl/content/uploads/2020/12/Hanbdook_EN_72DPI.pdf

Post 1 (written): https://www.mediafactory.org.au/xiangfan-chen/2025/03/19/reflections-on-f…l-culture-post-1/

Post 2 (video): https://vimeo.com/1068090535?share=copy

Film Spa (79 mins, Czech Republic, dir Miroslav Janek, 2015) is a documentary that explores the history and evolution of one of the world’s oldest film festivals – the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) – in the Czech Republic. While the documentary focuses specifically on KVIFF, its depiction of how the festival has been shaped by societal and political influences reflects broader patterns seen across international film festivals. Hence, in this blog, I will be discussing the past, present, and future of international film festivals through the lens of KVIFF as depicted in Film Spa.

KVIFF was first established in 1946 when Czechoslovakia was democratic, so the festival started off by screening a mix of European and international films. Yet, in 1948, The Communist Party seized power in the country, and Czechoslovakia officially became communist. This had directly affected KVIFF as cinema and media became to be controlled; the festival’s purpose shifted to promote socialist ideology, such as collective ownership and economic equality. Socialist realism, a state-mandated artistic style, started to take over other styles. KVIFF then officially became the festival of the Eastern Bloc, showcasing only communist movies. Essentially, the Czech movies at the period became propaganda-driven, and the festival itself has also become a tool for propaganda.

Yet, KVIFF wasn’t the only film festival that was influenced by politics. For example, the Venice Film Festival was censored during 1930s to 1940s by fascist regime. Almost all films advocating for anti-fascism were excluded from the festival, whilst films from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were favoured (Favero et al., 2018). Furthermore, the Berlin International Film Festival which considered itself as the counterpart of KVIFF, was also used as a propaganda in a similar way, except that it was anti-Soviet and pro-democratic (Fehrenbach, 2020). It was therefore clear that there were power dynamics existing between politics and film festivals across nations. At that time, film festivals were just another form of battleground – a cultural one, where different ideologies invade, occupy, and exert.

However, as political landscapes changed, many film festivals evolved from state-controlled political messengers into global platforms celebrating artistic independence. For KVIFF, this shift took place in 1989, when the Velvet Revolution ended communist rule in Czechoslovakia, ushering in a new era of democracy. By 1994, KVIFF was officially taken over by a new team, who rebranded the festival to only showcase independent and arthouse films. Today, most international film festivals have declared their independence from political influence.

One tip for curating film festival that I would like to learn from KVIFF was the way it cultivated a cultural space. It didn’t just make itself merely an industrial event like Cannes, where in my opinion, too much focus is placed on red carpets, Hollywood stars and even scandals, and the experience of audience is less valued (Ostrowska, 2016). I love how KVIFF provides chances for filmmakers, audience, and critics to gather together, discussing and exchanging their thoughts on the film and the broader society. I believe that experiences like this is what truly distinguishes a film festival to a movie screening. I hope that we could also create a similar atmosphere in our final film festival, through similar means like hosting high tea or Q&A sessions.

References:

Dorota Ostrowska, “Making film history at the Cannes film festivalLinks to an external site.” in Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell and Skadi Loist (eds), Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, Routledge, New York, 2016, pp. 18-33.

Favero, G., Moretti, A., De Munck, B., Van Damme, I., & Miles, A. (2018). The Venice International Film Festival and the City. The Venice International Film Festival and the City: Building a Cultural Tourist Destination by Juxtaposition (pp. 216–236). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315167046-11

Fehrenbach, H. (2020). The Berlin International Film Festival: between cold war politics and postwar reorientation. Studies in European Cinema, 17(2), 81–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/17411548.2019.1631533

The end-of-semester Exhibition is finally happening! I have looked forward to it for so long. I am excited to see what other groups have done and what feedback we will receive. To set up our group’s displacement space in accordance with our theme, we brought a special prop to the exhibition – a small clock. This clock has served as an important hint for our short film. It mostly appeared in the background throughout the protagonist’ illusion and reality; however, something special about this clock is that its legs do not move at all. It was completely stationary, meaning that time has been distorted both in the illusion and the reality. Through this, we wanted to raise a question for our audience – is the reality that the protagonist thought he was in actually the reality? Is it possible that he was in the illusion throughout?

In order to see whether this hint has been successfully conveyed to our audience, I conducted some survey at the exhibition. I explained to two groups about the meaning behind the clock, and asked them whether they have noticed it. Out of the six classmates I surveyed, one person has fully noticed it (after watching the video twice), four people have guessed that the clock is special but did not recognise its meaning, and one person did not notice it at all. Overall, I think the hint was conveyed quite successfully. One thing that I think we could improve was to make the appearances of the clock more obvious. Initially, the camera did not focus on the clock until the very last scene, but if I were to refilm the project, I would probably include a few more medium shot on it during the first half of the film. I therefore learnt that, when we are planning the plot – especially something that is subtle – we have to always remember that the audience knows less than you, and most of the time you only have one chance to make them understand.

Other feedback I receive from the class were mostly about our editing. A few people also commended on our audio tracks, as they thought that the background musics we used were very accurate, and the transitions between them are smooth and natural. They also liked how we layered different soundtracks (keyboard typing, footsteps, calling, etc) in complementary to the scene in the office which was generated by AI. By layering different soundtracks, they thought that the scene has become much more real.

Overall, I think the exhibition has drawn a very nice end to my semester. I have enjoyed all the assignments in Augmenting Creativity, and there was not one moment where I regrated taking this course. I am fully confident that the skills I gained from this course will be of bigger use for my future projects. Thank you, Dan.

We spent two full days in the underground dungeon (the edit suite ^^) this week to finish off our assignment 4. I know this might sound crazy, but it was actually my first time using Premiere Pro, which makes the whole process very interesting and rewarding. I’ve been using Final Cut Pro for a few years, so I decided to keep using it for my Uni assignment (at least for my previous ones). Although I knew that I should probably start switching to Premiere ASAP, I was never brave enough to step out of my comfort zone and make this change, because for me, changing editing tool = losing all previous editing skills = producing academic rubbish.

But for this assignment, I am willing to try out Premiere for the group, because it’s something that the rest of my team members are familiar with. Surprisingly, it has worked out so much better than I imagined. I feel very lucky to be able to work with Chuling because we both love editing – we’ve treated it as something that is more than a school assignment. We wanted to try our very best for this project, so we spent so much time navigating through different functions on Premiere. We were never stopped by the scary settings on Premiere; whenever we had an idea, we would try every way that can achieve it. Within that few days in the edit suite, we’ve watched dozens of tutorial videos, gaining and applying a lot more new editing skills, and finally producing something that we are both happy with in terms of editing.

One of the most exciting attempts we did was trying to apply mask onto our videos. Since we’ve generated a lot of AI footages, we wanted to mash them together in different ways, rather than just layering them or making jump cuts between them. I therefore thought of masking, where I can manually draw a shape, and replace the part within the shape with something else. By selecting and replacing the parts from a clip one by one, the old clip will essentially be replaced by a new clip, like a transition. The results we got from experimenting this was also satisfactory.

This assignment therefore let me realise something new about teamwork – the best and quickest way to learn something is when you are in a group environment (at least for me), because it makes you feel like that you are not facing the challenge alone. There are definitely imperfections in our final video, but I don’t really want to talk about or critique them in this reflection. No matter what grade we will receive for this assignment, I genuinely feel proud for myself and my team, for the attention we paid on the details, the time we dedicated, the challenges that we overcame, and the tolerance and encouragement we gave to each other.

This week is also very practical as we systematically looked at the process of writing a good academic essay. Although I have written some essays during middle school and high school, I always felt like I was not taughton how to do that – we kind of just figured our way through, even if the writing pathway we eventually settled on wasn’t necessarily the most productive one.

This week’s lesson was therefore very helpful for me, as I learnt a lot about constructing the skeleton of an essay, which turned out to be much more important than I originally thought. The way I prepared for an essay was quite lazy – I would have a document called “idea bank” and then another document called “actual essay”. In the research document I would note down some links to some articles but never annotate them; having one sentence summarising it was the max that I would do. I am also pretty sure that the order I did my essay was wrong – I would come out with a research question or a thesis myself first before I delve into deeper research. After I construct the thesis, I would also write out some points that I want to make in my essay, and then look for sources that match my ideas. I think this lazy method was able to work for my previous assignments because they were quite simple and generic, which luckily makes the questions I came up with reasonable. But now, I realised that as I step into higher education, I should really change my way of doing it. From the lesson, I learnt that a real good thesis must come from research, not my own head – I have to see what scholars have studied, proposed, and asked, and whether any of this can relate to my interest or experience. I also learnt that a good way of doing this was to construct a ‘network of academic sources’, and choose some from it to make an annotated bibliography, where we summarise, cite, note, and highlight the academic studies.