Stress, stress, stress.

With the fundraiser looming over us, only a week away, I think I speak for the whole class when I say that we are a *little* bit stressed over the whole thing. No one quite knows what is going on, we’ve only sold a handful of tickets and I don’t think most people hold out much hope for this being wildly successful.

Having the break just the week before, not much was done in terms of planning or organising the event or the final film festival- especially in terms of promotion, unfortunately. The programming team has finally gotten through all the submissions and we’re down to our top 30 which we plan on cutting down to 25 to keep to the ’25 under 25 minutes by under 25’s’ theme. Also, because we want to add or have an ‘Australiana’ section of the program, we want to solicit at least one more Australiana film (currently we have a total of five). I think while it’s lovely to show off all the international works from across the globe, it’s also important to recognise the roots of this festival and help to promote our Australian future filmmakers in some capacity; the Australiana Screening being a great idea for this.

Something else we’ve had to be mindful of with the screenings is the classification of films. With the reading,  “Guidelines for the Classification of Films 2012”, I think this helped us a lot to determine what is age appropriate. While there’s no hard and fast rule now with classifying film festival shorts, we landed on the fact that all the screenings are ‘unclassified 15+’ and that in order for someone under the age of 15 to attend, that they must be accompanied by a parent or legal guardian. Our 18+ sessions are only over 18 due to the serving of alcohol and not necessarily film related.