Sophie Theodosi – Program Booklet

UPDATEDmoffprogram

 

The design team were responsible for the creation of the Program Booklet which was shared digitally to those interested in attending the film festival. I was personally privileged to watch most of the short films in detail to select a still image to be used in the program. It felt special to experience viewing the films before they were stream to an audience, because it felt as though I was honoured with a private viewing experience. It was challenging to choose the images because I wanted to avoid spoiling the films, whilst still maintaining a level of curiosity and interest to the audience in the hopes of sparking their attention. Many filmgoers are visual learners, as the sceptical of viewing a film is largely visual, thus choosing the stills felt like an important task. The program is significant, personally, to the festival organisational team because it gives credit, on the first page of the program, to all those involved, indicating their name and role in the production of the festival. Another challenge was choosing a still that would fit into a square shape, as this was our choice of design for the program. In some ways this was a blessing in disguise, as it allowed us to cut out aspects of the shot as to avoid spoiling too much about the films’ synopsis. Overall, it was crucial to choose visually appealing and compelling photographs that were aesthetically pleasing.

The program is significant to MOFF and the festival experience studio as a whole because it visually embodies the studio’s work over the course of the semester into one medium. The program is significant to the running of the festival as a whole because it keeps the public informed and aware of what films are being streamed and when. It also acts as a form of advertisement, a sneak peak into what is to be expected of the festival, and an opportunity to promote sponsors. We created a page of sponsor logos to give thanks and appreciation to their support towards MOFF. In exchange for their donations, we created a mutually beneficial relationship with the sponsors by advertising their brands and services. The colour scheme of the program aligned with the MOFF logo, however we simplified it to a red, black and white scheme so the focus would be drawn to the still images and the films themselves. We no longer wanted to draw attention to the visual identity of MOFF, but instead shine the attention on the program itself. The audience is already drawn into the concept of the festival as they were viewing the program, it was now our mission to maintain their interest and encourage them to attend the festival itself by presenting the films in an appealing, yet minimalist style. We designed the program colours to be dark, with red details due to the vast selection of horror and thriller genre films. These colours aligned with the chosen still images which were dark, mysterious, and alluring.

Publicity & Mission Statement- Steff Fairlie

PUBLICITY/PR 

Deciding to involve myself with the production team was largely based on my previous skillsets and abilities and many of the tasks I worked on within that role felt relatively second nature. However, when the opportunity to work as MOFF’s publicist appeared I took on the role in hopes to break free from my comfort zone and acquire some new skills in the industry, and that I did. My first task as MOFF’s publicist was to create a press/media release that would cover all important MOFF information for public knowledge (films and events, submissions, venue and location, ticketing etc) and compile a list of relevant contacts to forward said release to. This was a lengthy process and required constant communication with all MOFF teams to ensure I could compile as much correct information into the release as possible before it was distributed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once the release was out, I quickly needed to filter through responses to ensure I could get any requested material (extra images, film stills etc) out asap. One of the greatest skills I think I acquired during this time was professional email etiquette, as I was replying to and forwarding plenty of emails, and as the face of MOFF’s media relations it was essential all communication was of a professional manner. MOFF’s PR resulted in some interesting opportunities for our team, including an opening for our programmers to speak on Another Bloody Movie Podcast, a local film podcast hosted by critic Sean Coates (linked below). We also garnered some attention on websites and blogs, including a very visually appealing feature on The Capitols official website.

I did face some difficulties as MOFF’s publicist, especially when it became apparent that our festival would need to be shifted online. This required me to quickly put together another greatly detailed press release, however when it came time to send out the release, I faced some major technical issues that greatly impacted our release plan. Thankfully our hard-working social media and marketing team were able to work quickly to resolve any gaps in communication about MOFFs change of pace as a result of Melbourne’s COVID-19 crisis, and we were still able to keep MOFF’s audience and media partners well informed and up to date.

ANOTHER BLOODY MOVIE PODCAST EPISODE:

https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/abmp-ep-49-melbourne-overlooked-film-festival-moff/id1199195290?i=1000524365421

POST ON THE CAPITOL WEBSITE:

https://thecapitol.tv/event/melbourne-overlooked-film-festival-2021/

 

MISSION STATEMENT

In the early stages of MOFF’s production, it was essential we all worked together to create a mission statement that would reflect who we are and what we set out to achieve at MOFF. To do this we researched some popular film festivals mission statements to get a sense of form and tone before grouping together to produce a draft and final mission statement. This statement gave MOFF a sense of shared purpose and identity and its creation was incredibly integral to all creative and administrative decisions made. Our mission statement was made available on our website, film freeway, Indiegogo campaign and social media platforms and served as a reference point for other areas of production, such as our media release and copy. MOFF’s official mission statement is as follows:

 

The MOFF is an RMIT student run initiative of cinema lovers determined to shine a light on the underground, under-appreciated and unconventional films from local and international filmmakers. 

Through thematic programming we are highlighting films which don’t fit the mould of the mainstream. 

We welcome a diverse audience to participate in an inclusive event for film fanatics interested in unveiling the weird and wonderful. 

 

Henry Stuckey – Tech Testing

Early on in the production of MOFF there was a key focus on primarily the usage of the projectors in the Capital and the professionals that would help us run them. We communicated primarily through email with the projectionist but we did speak with him during the initial tour of the capital. With the swift change to an online setting within the last few weeks before the screenings there was a shift to introducing the streaming platform. This presented a new variety of challenges that would also have to be quickly remedied through the tech testing section that the team and I performed before the first screening.

We placed significant focus on finding someone who had a computer and internet connection that could easily stream. This is primarily due to a lot of students not having the correct technology for the job, like my small laptop. This would also require a computer that could stream and run zoom at the same time as they would be needed simultaneously for the interview portions. The reason I think the tech testing portion is so crucial to the streaming of the festival is due to the need to hammer out any potential problems. This included making sure that zoom calls actually appeared on stream and that their sound worked, seeing if the stream came through smoothly, arranging smooth transitions and adjusting any potential faults that could appear potential failures during the stream.

The short films that were tested were successful and streamed easily enough during the testing but when it came to the film ‘Body Melt’ it caused some significant problems. YouTube has an algorithm that watches for copywritten material and will flag such if found, only a few hours before the first night of the screening the stream was flagged. This threw a wrench into the works as the we had to scramble to find a replacement that was both effective and easily accessible. I suggested some potentials that were used by other festivals but it was opted that we go for more simple one like switch. Which was done in time, but even with the initial trials and tech testing there was still problems with the first stream but it was significantly fixed during the second testing the next day before the second stream.

Original Twitch Account: moffrmit (Taken down)

Original YouTube Tech Test screening: (109) MOFF *test* – YouTube

Sidney Scott – Design Pack & Awards/Laurels

As a combination of my natural instinct to document happenings and my involvement with the design team, part of my contribution to the making of the Melbourne Overlooked Film Festival (MOFF) was creating a design booklet to outline official design choices that had been made in terms of our visual identity. This included the fonts and logos used, logos and laurels for our sponsors and selected films to use, and the correct way to use these things. The correct file sizes for web use versus certificates and official documents was outlined to ensure nobody could steal high quality versions of our laurels and use them fraudulently. The HEX codes for colours used were also included so that our web design and social media could match and flow together seamlessly. The process of making this booklet was fairly straightforward and allowed me to dust off my Adobe InDesign skills to compile the designs of myself and my teammates. Obviously this booklet was not a rulebook, but a guide for social media teams and brands to understand our colour palettes, styles, and preferred layouts. This allowed our team to be creative while establishing a clear style and aesthetic, and also prevented them from having to waste their energy on the basics of fonts and colours and promoting unity amongst all platforms.

MOFF Design Package

Another task of mine was to create laurels and certificates for the 18 officially selected films, 3 award winners, and a general MOFF laurel. This means that I created 21 certificates and 10 complete laurel variations, all in different file types for mediums such as the web stream, social media use, sending to directors to acknowledge their achievement and add to film posters, covers, and official imagery. On the closing night off MOFF I was making certificates for award winners as I got the verdicts for Best Australian Film and Best International Film from the jurors, and then during the award ceremony created the certificate for the Kaye Swarski Audience Choice Award. I put a lot of effort into making the certificates look and feel special for all official selections and award winners as I feel it’s incredibly important to celebrate the wins in life, especially in a creative industry such as film. The laurels had to be good enough to go on film posters, and the certificates needed to be good enough to frame and display on a wall to remind the filmmakers of their successes. I want to the thank MOFF’s jurors Cerise Howard and Hudson Sowada for providing me with their verdicts and signatures in a timely manner, and the production team for providing me with the name and winner of the audience choice award so quickly.

Certificates & Laurels (examples of work)

Streaming Platform – Laura Gough

As a part of the production team, I was responsible for finding a suitable streaming option for the switch to an online film festival. Never having streaming anything before, I did some research and I initially settled on YouTube. I found that YouTube was the most user-friendly platform in terms of how we wanted the festival to run as we wanted to prioritise a live chat.

During the testing process however, we ran into a copyright issue with one of the films meaning we needed to find another platform that could cater to us. As a group, we settled on Twitch as it was the most similar to YouTube and it also ran off of the same Open Broadcast Software we were using to coordinate the stream.

As the actual festival was running however, our stream was taken down from Twitch, so we had to move the stream back to YouTube, and then back to Twitch to play the film that wasn’t able to be played on YouTube. Having done tests runs of MOFF definitely saved a lot of stress as when the stream when down on Twitch, we had the back up on YouTube ready to go, making the transition a lot smoother than it could’ve been.

MOFF Twitch:

https://www.twitch.tv/moverlookedff

MOFF YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWhtANEq2_datQmBm2hXcNg

Aubree Maranan – Logo

 

The logo was the first design piece I had created for MOFF and set the visual tone for the rest of MOFF’s visual identity. Early on in the studio, the class collectively decided on a moth as our motif after landing on a name for out film festival. With its play on our name, MOFF, and the idea that a moth is also ‘overlooked’ in regards to its butterfly counterpart, the class thought it would be best suited. 

 

To achieve the logo, I drew the moth with a black marker which I then scanned and created a digital copy through illustrator. The sketchy style denotes the gritty, underground themes that are associated with MOFF’s ideas of being overlooked and challenging the mainstream. I opted for the moth to be simply black so it could be used for both professional and informal documents. This meant that it could be used as a .png image on its own for more professional documents, and that it also didn’t clash with any other colours or designs when used in other places. The background of the logo was developed by manipulating a film picture I had developed a while back which had light leaks from opening the camera prematurely. While unhappy about the developed images in the beginning, I’m happy it has been put to good use now. Editing the colours to appear more vibrant, I settled on an eye-grabbing red and yellow colour palette. The red also relates to the initial conversations of gore and exploitation films that the film festival centred around; namely our screened feature film, Body Melt. Additionally, I layered a gain overlay to create a gritty texture and further enhance ideas of MOFF’s alternative values. 

 

Creating a black motif with a coloured background worked out well as it allowed the design team to make iterations of the logo in different formats so it didn’t look repetitive, but still distinctly MOFF. This can be seen in the program booklet front page where there is a black background but the red and yellow pattern is still conveyed through the moth. This can also be seen with the red and yellow background also being used as the background of the film title cards used in the festival, and the social media banners and posts. 

 

Although there are some things I wish I could tweak looking at it now, I’m happy with what I was able to come up with in an emergence of needing to soft launch and create an identity for MOFF.

Mia Simmons – Instagram posts and promotional content

Due to my interest in social media coordinating and experience in Instagram promotional content, I chose the role of handling MOFF’s Instagram along with Prada and Layla. Before the “soft-launch” of our festival on social media, we made sure to have a clear and concise plan of what our Instagram would look like in terms of representing the ethos of MOFF and ensuring our page had an appealing aesthetic that was engaging and unique to MOFF. We made sure to emphasise the colour red throughout our Instagram posts working collaboratively with the design team to create posts that were not only eye-catching on people’s feeds but represented our ethos and the eccentric nature of our Festival. Looking at other film festivals Instagrams was an essential tool in terms of influencing our accounts layout on what to post and the construction of our grid. We structured our page following the 3-grid line, ensuring each line was consistent and had its own exclusive theme, however, still adhered with the overall colour scheme of the festival. Over the course of the 2 nights of our festival it was integral we kept the formation of our grid intact which made it challenging when having to quickly whip up posts informing our audience on technical difficulties and other updates. Although, we still managed to conform to our concise Instagram structure and format despite these obstacles!

We made sure to do in-depth research into how to build a following on Instagram which led us to utilising the “business” Instagram feature which allowed us to create promotional content and ads to grow our reach and engagement which further increased our chances of a greater following and thus a wider audience! Our professional dashboard reveals that we have reached over 24.6K accounts in the last 30 days with 2,991 content interactions. We created 3 promotional posts which gave us an estimated reach of over 3,000 accounts. Our top post “MOFF IS FREE” reached over 19K accounts which in turn have us a bonus 36 followers. Overall, the MOFF Instagram account reached 394 followers with a total of 1,887 likes from 63 posts.

Abigail Liptrot – Organisational Systems

I was responsible for creating the organisation systems we had in place, to keep everything in track. There were 3 forms of these systems; an excel spreadsheet with everyone’s personal details for contact, a discord for communication, and a google drive where all important information would go. Firstly, the excel spreadsheet ensured that everyone had access to individuals contact details, which allowed for easy communication without clogging up other communication channels like discord. This spreadsheet was also how I sent out the invite to the discord, so it was incredibly useful. This spreadsheet will not be shared here however, because it has personal information that should not be publicly shared.

The discord was where the majority of team communication took place, especially outside of class hours. It had a general space for entire class communication, as well as channels for each team to focus on their areas of responsibility. There were also voice channels for each of these areas where meetings could be held. The @ system on the discord meant that if we ever needed to contact a specific person, it could be done in a way that would alert them, to avoid wasting time.

The google drive was where we placed all official documents. It housed planning documents, design templates, and many more. Having this google drive set up meant that instead of having all documents spread out, having to share it with the class each time and potentially missing someone, everything could be found easily. We also had an organisational system in place within the drive, which allowed for easy navigation.

Short Film Streams – Jacob Agius

Programming the short film streams for each night was one of the most crucial tasks I had as part of the programming team for MOFF. It was a fantastic experience being able to review our top contending film submissions and place them together to make a whole, but it also proved to be quite challenging due to the amount of films we all really enjoyed. So to make things a bit easier for myself and the team, I put all of our top films together and we used a colour coding system to determine in a democratic way what films we should screen. You can really see this on the second picture where we used green and yellow colour tabs to determine how we felt about each film, green being good and yellow being unsure and for nearly all the films we used a majority rules vote to determine what films would screen.

However this proved challenging in its own way because after the films were chosen, I had to piece them all together to create the streams. I was really influenced by the idea of telling a story and themes through the placement of the films in the stream and I wanted them to sort of play off each other and eb and flow in intensity as if someone was watching one big feature film instead of a series of short films. I found this really enjoyable to do and because I had already been thinking about how these films would flow it was quite easy to fit them together. However we did have to unfortunately pass on some fantastic films that we wanted to screen because they didn’t thematically fit with the stream, which was probably the hardest part of the process, but I think having a more concise stream was ultimately the best way to go.

After the films were chosen we used colour coding again, which you can see in the first picture, to determine which directors had been contacted and had sent us their film and which films were the nominees for our two main awards, best local and best international short film. I can’t stress enough how crucial this colour coding was for our organisation because it ensured that everyone knew what was going on with each film and everyone was able to see what needed to be worked on further, which ultimately streamlined our work.

Short Streams 1

 

Short Streams 2

Public Interviews

Gabriella Hills – Artistic Director & Programmer

Art Smitten

Another Bloody Movie Podcast

Thanks to our PR team, Jacob and I – both Artistic Director’s & Programmer’s for MOFF – were lucky enough to join Imogen and Sean on their audio shows, Art Smitten and Another Bloody Movie Podcast respectively (linked above). This was an amazing opportunity for us to speak candidly about the ins and outs of building a film festival, and promote MOFF to their audiences. These interviews occurred ten days out from opening, which meant their release was super timely in reaching potential audience members and gaining traction for the festival.

Both of these interviews got me out of my comfort zone and proved to be an amazing learning curve. It proved the ‘fake it til you make it’ strategy can indeed work. It was also integral to the success of the festival, as it acted as positive publicity. Jacob and I on air had great chemistry, which I believe mirrored the vibe and ethos of MOFF in general. It was also such an easy, quick process. The interviews were set up by our PR team member, and both were done in half a day. Above all else, we had so much fun doing it. Viva la MOFF.