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

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