The New Normal International Festival came to be as a response to the current COVID-19 pandemic situation. From social distancing to quarantine and to a lock down – we all had to be at our homes working on this festival. Before the pandemic happened, I was looking forward so much to be part of a team organizing a physical film festival. I must admit I was disappointed that we could only hold an online one but hey, it turned out to be something really interesting and full of challenges that got me excited.
The name ‘New Normal’ came from Cerise, which honestly, was the perfect name among all the others the team shared. The ‘new normal’ was very well appropriate with the current pandemic situation – because everything we are going to be doing in our everyday lives is going to be the new normal, like having to sit a seat apart? It would be interesting to watch films related to the term ‘new normal’.
It was interesting to see the various components required to build a festival. I have experienced a couple of times organizing a festival, only difference is that it was a music festival. But I do see a lot of similarity in organizing an event in general. Over the past experiences up till this current one, I have learned the importance of communication and some chemistry is important. We could all be good at doing our jobs but if we cannot communicate to each other well, nothing is going to go well either. Communication was somewhat a problem we may not have realized throughout the process but I am guessing it was the lack of getting to know each other well, considering the fact that the pandemic hit us almost at the beginning and we only could work together online – plus some of us are at different parts of the world like for me, I am 3 hours later than Australia. However, I am glad I worked with most people very well and that they were very easy to approach – being approachable is what I learnt during this process and especially when we have not known each other so well.
An online film festival is no doubt, a very challenging one. A film festival needs to connect its audience to the atmosphere and have some form of interactivity to keep the audience interested. All of these to be done online. Which is very, very difficult when I thought of it at first. I would say I was a useful asset to the team in terms of website creation as I was familiar in creating websites using WordPress – it is cheaper to host on WordPress than other sites. Just on the same day I’m typing this, our website crashed and I had to rebuild the whole website from zero – part an parcel of owning a site and especially during this pandemic situation, hackers are much more alive, no matter how good your security add-ons are.
There was a point of time where I was overwhelmed with work and that was when the website was coming up and I had to roll out individual emails. It was tough trying to get everyone’s attention to set up their emails, it did take some time. I learnt that with regards to IT, there are a lot of trial and error situations whenever you have to set something up, you try and then you fail but you got to pick yourself back up and get it working. You snooze, you lose. This was when I had to do a lot of research online from watching tutorials and reading guides to get our website starting back up again – it was the longest day of my life. However, I am glad it is back up again.
Just like any work process, there needs to be a workflow. In this case, the creation and updating of the website could have had a workflow. In other organizations, when a website needs to be updated, a staff will fill up a form and input the necessary resources for the updates required on the website. But in our situation, I guess we did not have enough time and had to rush through quite a lot of things. Well, we made it anyway!
If there is one thing I’d wished for, is that we all had time to get to know each other well and that we had more time to organize this festival.