Due to my interest in photography and videography, I worked in the design/socials team to help create and produce content for our socials and advertising. The first video we released onto our socials was the MOFF BTS/Trailer which we created to give an insight to our audience about the things to come. In this video, I included short interviews of each different groups of MOFF (What is MOFF? What are we up to in terms of progress? What is the purpose of your team?) along with some b-roll footage of our class at work. I attempted to ensure that any classmates that wanted to be featured were part of this trailer and we thought that by creating this, it would allow our audience to gain an understanding of all things happening behind our festival and create a sense of closeness between our audience and class.

The second clip that we had recorded of our class was the MOFF skit which was more of a comedic clip compared to our trailer which we had done to create senses of fun for our audience. We created this video to help increase audience engagement on our socials and again provide a look at what’s to come in a lighter way. Overall, it was really nice to be able to put mine and Vi’s photography and videography interests into use. It’s disappointing that MOFF went online as I think about other content we could have produced but nevertheless it was great being able to capture the BTS and create something fun with MOFF 🙂

Indiegogo Pitch Video

Austar Vannak

As a part of the production and operation team of MOFF, we are required to seek funds in order to operate and run our film festival event. Though we are seeking further sponsors and partner, we also seeking donations likewise have formed an online identity on a crowdfunding platform named, Indiegogo. In order to create an account, we are to create a pitch video to be shown and appeal to the public backers.

In this video pitch video, we presented ourselves in the order of introducing what our identity is, aims, mission and as well as have referenced our financing objectives. Normally, the Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign often runs for only a week. But as we are seeking as much help could, we ran the crowdfunding page for about fourteen days (2 weeks).

These were our financing objectives on Indiegogo, crowdfunding page:

• If you spend $50, you will receive a T-Shirt, program acknowledgement, and link to all online sessions.
• If you spend $150 or more, you will receive a t-shirt, program acknowledgement, acknowledgement in opening and closing speeches, link to all online classes and an award named after you.

As a result of running this funding page, we have acquired a sum of 265 AUD in donations from our benefactors. Along with that, we were hoping to utilize the funds in running MOFF in person. However, as lockdown struck we were forced to mount the film festival through an online platform instead. Noticeably, running a virtual film festival is significantly less costly than an in-person event. Hence, though we had aimed previously to use the money donated to fund our festival. We have respectfully resorted to reimbursing some of the money to the ones who had donated a large sum to us.

The programming team this year decided to opt for the use of Film Freeway as the main source of submissions. This allowed us to make a global call for submissions resulting in an ultimately very diverse international film festival without having to work too hard in actually hunting down films.

We began our call for submissions on the 29th of April and charged an initial early bird submission fee of $8 ($6 for students) which then jumped to $15 ($10 for students) on the 7th of May. We also took the initiative to waive fees for First Nations filmmakers and those with disability.

One of the interesting things that we found was that the quality of submissions shot up when the fee was raised, perhaps as the greater fee made the festival appear more reputable or maybe it just filtered out some of the films that filmmakers were less confident with. In the end, the festival made $767.38 from a total of 106 submissions over Film Freeway which the programming team then divided up for viewing. Those films that other programmers felt were worthy of selection then had to be viewed by the rest of the programming team and receive a majority vote for selection.

Whilst not all films were selected via Film Freeway, the platform certainly allowed us to receive a greater depth of submissions with ease and accounted for the majority of selected films.

Website and Email

Andrea Garcia

In the making of Melbourne Overlooked Film Festival, I chose to develop and design the festival’s official website as well as be in charge of maintaining the email database and festival newsletter. It was a surprising achievement for me as I lack any IT-related skills but I managed to succeed after endless research and tutorials later. 

I secured @moffrmit.com emails for everyone and departmental teams, adding a professional flair to the festival for sponsors and media partners alike. Although there were a few hiccups with sending and receiving emails on different platforms and ports, they were very minor and made sure to assist anyone who needed help. I used WordPress and Bluehost to create the website and domain name, putting in pages such as an About page, Contact info, Submission link, Sponsorship package, Program booklet, Media partners/sponsors, embedded Twitch interface with a chat function and details for each film. 

In terms of insights, there were 3k views and 1k unique visitors between April and June, with 606 visits on the 11th alone whereby most visitors came from Facebook and Search Engines. In the lead-up to the festival, I tried to experiment with SEO to further enhance the website’s visibility which was a great learning experience. Additionally, I would send out regular emails outlining any important updates of the festivals. 

https://moffrmit.com/ 

Catering and Micro-Operations

William Xie

Originally, a large sum of my labour went into assisting Rebecca Madin. We curated the sponsorship package, list of contacts and sent out emails to potential stakeholders. However, as the face-to-face launch date drew closer, I began planning for catering, flyer distribution, ticketing and other micro-resources.

On the opening night of any festival, it is a common practice to serve guests free food. Since The Capitol Theatre had licensed Mahony Group to provide catering for functions within the venue. It was my responsibility to liaise with Rebecca Reich, and members of the programming team, to find a suitable time. This way guests can access food services without interrupting their festival experience. Additionally, I discovered that Mahony Group has a minimum spend of $1250, if MOFF wanted to provide free canape food to 25 people. Needless to say, MOFF could not afford free catering, which meant that our guests had to pay for their food at The Capitol’s candy bar.

Before MOFF’s restructure to host an online event, MOFF had planned 2 days at The Captiol and 1 day in Building 80. Beginning on June 10^th at 6:40 pm, and June 11^th at 4:30 pm, the catering services at The Captiol will range from 6 pm to 7:15 pm on the 10^th, and 4:30 to 5:15 pm, 6 to 7:15 pm, on the 11^th.

Other than catering, I also sourced out free lanyards for the design team. It was expected that all team members would wear a lanyard on the day to differentiate themselves from the audience. Unfortunately, these efforts were all undermined due to a snap 2-week lockdown. It was a heartache to re-email Rebbecca Reich to undo all the plans we made. The lanyards will not see the light of day, and the Eventbrite ticketing schedule we set up had been scrapped as the online festival will now be free to access.

Catering and micro operations

Sponsors and the MOFF Sponsorship Package

Bec Madin

For the Melbourne Overlooked Film Festival (MOFF), I worked within the production team sourcing sponsors. I found this task challenging as my job was to pitch our festival to established and reputable brands in order to gain support. 

Myself and William created the ‘MOFF 2021 Sponsorship Package’. Within it, we included multiple packages for potential sponsors to choose from. This included a ‘financial sponsor’ which consisted of a monetary donation, an ‘in-kind sponsor’, a donation of their services/goods, and a ‘media partner’, a promotion of our festival. The financial sponsorship package had three options to choose from, basic, standard and premium. It was difficult to gain financial support from businesses especially due to the impact COVID-19 had on many small companies. However, we were able to obtain a lot of support through media promotion and in-kind offers which helped MOFF reach a larger target audience and provide amazing prizes for our MOFF winners. 

With the help of a professional-looking and well- designed, sponsorship package, we were able to gain the support of six different businesses. FILMINK, Lighthouse Rentals, RUSU, SYN Radio, Lili and Pearl Photography, and KAIJU Beer. Liaising with these sponsors was a full-time role. Juggling the negotiating of promotion, donations and money required a lot of correspondence, time, and energy. However, I am pleased to say the all the sponsors were fantastic to work with and supported us throughout. 

SponsorshipPackageFinal

Media Coverage 

Ida Prada – Instagram (Stories)

I landed a role in media coverage, specifically handling MOFF’s Instagram story.  With the use of Instagram’s stories and its unique features, I was able to engage with and create a relationship with our followers, maintaining a loyal audience and decreasing the chance of users unfollowing the page. What of MOFF that we want to transfer onto social media needs to have this organic, emotional wallop to it so that people can not only relate to what MOFF stands for but also feel safe in contributing to this liminal space.

The instagram story features that helped me achieve this includes the question sticker button that could be attached on a photo or video. It is a simple feature that allows you to ask a question and receive responses from your audience. Built to strengthen the communication between brands and their followers, the question feature helped MOFF to start more conversations with our audience. Especially through lockdown and the sudden change of our festival to a digital event, we had to make sure that we maintained a good relationship with our followers.  “What will you be watching while in Lockdown?” was a big hit. We also made a game that engaged our audience to choose whether they like “This Or That?” genre. Getting to know our audience was a crucial part of mounting a film festival- It helped us understand what our audience liked and wanted to see in the future- this was achieved through the Instagram Polls. With the information we received, we analyzed and took action on this feedback immediately; for example, we shared those answers as a sticker on top of films that have been edited to fit Instagram stories dimension.

It’s always a challenge when working with an audience; on our first day of screening, we had to change platforms twice. Within 10 – 15 minutes of announcing the change on our Instagram story, everyone from twitch was able to find their way into the youtube stream. It shows how the Instagram story is a great tool that helps boost our posts and reach more users. This can also be achieved from another Instagram story feature; countdown. From what I have observed, users are more likely to repost our posts/stories on their stories. So we used this opportunity to promote venues and sponsors too. Though sometimes we don’t get any constructive feedback, that didn’t stop us from using these features but instead learn what didn’t work out and develop other questions/themes/games. Overall, I’m very happy with what we achieved on Instagram! #MOFFRMIT

https://www.instagram.com/moffrmit/ 

Lauren Facci – Facebook Page & Event

As a member of the MOFF team, and due to my own interest in the world of social media, I took on the role of establishing MOFF’s presence on Facebook through both the Facebook page and Facebook event.  Facebook isn’t an application that I commonly use myself for sharing anything, so being able to target this platform and expand upon my skills in the area allowed me to utilize and explore a range of features that Facebook provides its users in order to assist us in messaging MOFF to our audience through several streams such as the Facebook event.

Facebook as a platform assisted me and our team in ensuring the most recent news and updates regarding MOFF, particularly in tackling our two biggest conundrums the shift to online and the stream going down, were being shared to our audience within a timely manner and that the messaging was clear and accessible across all platforms. I believe we were successful in achieving this goal as we made plans prior to any errors for posts to be made regarding these issues, writing up messages well in advance so that in the event we needed to post across all the social media platforms, we were prepared in order to ensure the swift messaging of the issues and how they were being remedied by our team.

There is much to talk about regarding our use of Facebook as a platform – but another crucial detail I believe assisted us in expanding our audience beyond our friends and family were the Facebook advertising campaigns that we ran, particularly the final ad campaign which helped advertise the event specifically. I believe this assisted us as a team as it provided us with a general idea of just how many attendees would attend the festival, and it was a pretty accurate measure too! We ended up getting to a viewer mass in the 70’s and 80’s on both nights at their peak which aligned with the number of individuals who marked themselves as ‘going’ on our Facebook page, thus allowing me to target more specific messaging to those we knew were attending and also to employ strategies that would bring those who had marked ‘interested’ towards marking themselves as ‘going’.

Facebook Page
Facebook Event

SHORT FILMS TRAILER

VI VO 

I always love to edit videos, so I took on the responsibility of making one of the festival trailers. The program team provided short films that they have chosen to be screened in MOFF sent to me through email. I got the short films and took out short interest scenes from those films into Adobe Premiere to edit. For the introduction of the trailer, I took the logo and background from the design team to create. I wanted to make the intro dramatic, therefore I put quite a time into searching for a music soundtrack. I also gave the intro a mysterious look by flashing the logo on and off at the start. For the ending, I added the date of the premiere of MOFF and the website for the viewers to know when MOFF is going to happen. When I finished the editing, I uploaded it to Google Drive, then I sent the link to my team through Facebook messenger, asking for their opinion. The internet has made sharing easy and convenient for remote work. One of my classmates responded back to me and pointed out 1  mistake I made on the date. I put an exclamation mark instead of number one. She then suggested that if I could make the outro the same vibe as the intro, and I thought it was a good idea, therefore I went and re-edit the trailer. The suggestion and feedback were helpful, as sometimes I could not see the mistakes that I made. Near the premiere day, a lockdown happened so we had to move our festival online, so I have to re-edit the trailer a little. I changed the date and announced the festival was a free online event.

Working in a diverse team is valuable. We could hear ideas and different perspectives from others and come together as one to create a special event such as MOFF.

Layla Suto

 TikTok / Instagram Reels

I had the pleasure to be part of the Social Media team, primarily handling the content creating and sharing of Instagram and TikTok.  As the social media team, it was our responsibility to act as a bridge between the public and the festival administration.  Therefore our protocols involved ensuring our online posts were up-to-date, informatively correct, and visually stimulating.  TikTok was a social media platform that was utilized to distribute fun content,  behind-the-scenes footage, and details relevant to MOFF.  TikTok was a hybrid of my own original content and trailers created by the design team.

As a method to make MOFF’s videos go viral, it was integral for our posts to consist of trending sounds, effects, filters, and hashtags.   Not only this, but to work alongside the TikTok algorithm, I ensured that content was posted every few days after 6:30 pm (when most Australian TikTok users are on their phones), and encouraged students to share, comment, and like our posts.  Unfortunately, while some videos providentially attained hundreds of views, others failed to make it onto the ‘For You’ page, leaving us with embarrassingly low views and likes. Notwithstanding, some TikToks were recycled onto Instagram as Reels, posts, and ‘Stories’ to promote TikTok and shine light onto the crafty videos.

I tried my best to post informative updates at the same times as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.  In doing so, I attempted to put a TikTok twist onto such updates and countdowns by lip-synching viral sounds and trends.   In regards to Instagram, I assisted by supplying feedback to the group, suggesting content ideas, writing up captions, and designing/posting stories during the course of the event nights.

Screencaps / Chats

Michelle Lin

As a team member of MOFF, I took the responsibility to do screen captures throughout the two nights of live streaming. I made sure to take multiple screencaps for every film including the conversations going on during each film. Interviews, of course, were captured as well. This part is necessary for both saving the memories of the first year of MOFF and providing proof to FilmFreeway.

Some examples for the films:

For the interviews:

For the chat:

Although it was precious to be able to capture these moments from the event, I still feel pity for not being able to see the audiences’ reactions in person. The films were beyond my expectation of quality. It would have been awesome to have them screened on the big screen in the Capitol. The experience of taking screencaps was definitely not as fun as taking photos in person, but I am still glad to have this different and innovative opportunity.

I have uploaded the majority of screencaps from both nights to our google drive.