I am very concerned for the fundraiser. Our Facebook event has plenty of “interests” and quite a few “goings”, but none of this has resulted in actual ticket sales. I’m also quite concerned about the choice of films. No one other than Ben has seen either film and while I trust that he knows what he’s doing, the fact that we are going with two little known, “so bad they’re good” films could turn off potential audience members. If we’d found or gotten the rights to films like The Room, Birdemic, and the like, I think we’d be swimming in ticket sales by now, though this could’ve been difficult to do.
I’ve been sending out emails non-stop for a week and have received exactly 1 response from FilmInk. I recognize this is likely because of the Easter break that is coming up but it is still worrying. FilmInk has agreed to advertise our festival on their website for as long as we’d like in exchange for very little (basically just a mention on our website and in our program). Dov seems like an absolute legend and I hope that this sets the tone for the rest of our potential sponsors. We don’t have our spaces locked in yet and this is making it harder to send accurate information.
Very few people were in our 5:30 pm class. I get that it’s right before the Easter break and that it is very alluring to just go home and start the holiday early, but it’s not good enough. Our fundraiser was meant to be the week we come back, and as a result of not enough planning and not enough people, we’ve decided to push it back a week. I’m grateful for this decision but I’m still disappointed that there weren’t more people here to decide on it.
Mia Falstein-Rush came in to give us a guest lecture and also fix all the problems I was having with the sponsorships. She has done literally everything I’d like to do in film festivals including creating the one-off Seen and Heard Film Festival which spoke directly to my little feminist heart.
Her lecture included a whole chunk on how to get sponsorships, how to write emails, she even included companies we could get in contact with! I wrote up an email draft that is ripped directly from the structure she presents in her lecture that everyone can access quickly if they have a sudden stroke of sponsor genius! I was honestly so inspired by this lecture, it really included everything I was interested in, everything I wanted to know, and again, everything that would fix the issues I’d been having. This was easily one of the best lectures I’ve seen in my time at RMIT.
I’m sort of disappointed that I’m not a part of the programming team. This is where most of my interest lay when we began, and I did put my hand up to be a part of the team originally, however, I think my missing a week and a half of classes really put me at a disadvantage. I’m glad I’m working on sponsorships now, and there is a LOT of work to be done, but I see how much fun the programming team is having watching films in class and I can only wonder what could have been…
I, unfortunately, missed the first class, but this gave me time to read! Luckily, one of the readings for this week just so happened to align with my eventual job (spoiler alert).
Right now, we don’t have a whole lot of time to raise funds. While the festival still feels lightyears away, two months will make it difficult to secure any kind of monetary funding, especially from international or government entities (which is upsetting, given we have chosen to be “Melbourne International Youth Film Festival”), and according to this weeks reading, festivals that are less than 5 years old are 88% funded by foreign funds and donors. At current, I’m not expecting we’ll raise any money through sponsorship, but that doesn’t mean we won’t try!
When I arrived, I found out that no one has taken on the task of hitting up alcohol companies for free booze. Apparently, there was some kind of moral quandary in doing this. Personally, I disagree with the existence of alcohol in the first place and think that making money off of it is inherently wrong (I am aware that I sound like some fundamentalist Christian or something and feel the need to clarify that I do partake in the occasional bev sesh) so I figure that getting free booze is not only morally ok but also social justice. I started out by looking up other festivals in Melbourne and seeing who sponsors them, and adding them to a spreadsheet that was helpfully already made up last week by Sean. I also looked up other Melbourne-based breweries.
On top of this, I’m currently writing the sponsorship package we’ll be sending off to potential partners. Again, Sean had already started this, so I’ll be using some of his wording in the end product. A lot of this package will be modeled off the Women’s Film Festival sponsorship package from Indiana. This should hopefully be finished by next weeks class so we can start sending them off ASAP. The spreadsheet has other potential sponsors that we can try as well for other things like promotion and maybe even money.
RESOURCES
Matthea de Jong and María Carrión, “Adding Water to the Soup Pot: Finding Resources for Your Festival (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.” in Setting Up a Human Rights Film Festival, vol. 2, Human Rights Film Network, Prague, 2015, pp. 115-129.
The week it begins just so happens to be the week that I am hit with extreme and undiscriminating illness! I was unfortunately absent from both classes as a result but that won’t stop me from talking about the beginning of the festival like I was involved!
I somehow ended up on the graphic design team. Now, to clarify, I have no graphic design experience whatsoever. I have the artistic chops of a dung beetle. But I also have the self-motivation and get-things-done-quick attitude of the dung beetle and started to design a logo. Naturally, this lead people to believe that I was interested in doing this long term. There is a very intense and design-oriented group chat that I am a part of, and in which I can contribute virtually nothing, so this is an excellent start to the festival for me.
As a result of my illness, I had time to READ! Something that really stood out to me was the Fred Kramer quote “the proliferation of film festivals is not sustainable. There will be some kind of attrition very soon.” This seemed to be the consensus throughout the article, from plenty of experts, and indeed from Richard Sowada in his lecture. Despite my past two depressing blog posts (apologies for those), I think I disagree. The attrition refers not to a destruction of film festivals as a whole, but to an abundance of bad film festivals. I think what needs to be recognized is that quality in itself can be extremely subjective. For example, a cult film such as The Room is of low quality, but people celebrate it and create screenings and rituals around it. A dingy, dive style venue such as Yah Yahs is of low quality, but people go in abundance because they enjoy the atmosphere. If we assume that film festivals are only great if they include the highest quality films, venues, guests, etc, we are actively ignoring some of the worlds greatest and most fun things. To assume that the amount of planning that goes into these low budget, start-up film festivals is not of the same quality as the planning that goes into something like Sundance is to state that having money is equal to having taste, drive, ambition, or ability. This type of mentality is similar to the mentality that ‘millennials are uncultured’ despite culture rapidly changing and the new ability to reach culture previously unavailable to us. It just seems a little elitest.