Final thoughts on living the festival experience
The inaugural MIYFF came and went in an almost dizzying flash and despite a lot worrying, a mouse appearing on the Backlot screen, guests not turning up and some very fruity tasting beer, I think we all came out of it unscathed. Instead of structuring the final blog post like an essay, I’ve decided to address key topics and elements of the making and production of MIYFF.
Opening Night
I thought that opening night was overall a success but it could’ve been much better. I always thought it was a bit of a stretch to say that we had sold out opening night and I very much wasn’t surprised when I saw that the cinema had at least 20 seats available. I have organised dozens of media, WOM and event screenings in my time and know the necessity to overbook seats. I actually felt slightly guilty that I didn’t tell anyone that we should’ve probably overbooked if we wanted to get a fuller house.
After turning up to opening night about 30 minutes after showtime, I couldn’t help but think we needed someone directing everyone in the class. I thought that the lack of direction was really evident when literally all the MIYFF team stayed inside the Backlot foyer instead of sitting in the cinema to fill in the seats.
Despite this, I was really heartened to see the crowds actively interact with the films on show. The 40 or so strong crowd where verging on rowdy at times during the screening which I thought was amazing and very MIYFF. The highlight of the night would have to be the MIYFF cake, which took a lot of us by surprise but looked absolutely amazing.
Australiana // Closing Night
I think that opening night going off without a hitch really calmed our collective nerves leading into day two of MIYFF. I thought that day two of MIYFF, which was attended with decidedly less of the MIYFF team went really well and our efficiency on the day was quite revealing in a lot of ways. Unlike opening night, where we were all in attendance and just standing around, we had a small but focused team which knew exactly what all our tasks were.
We had Sean and Brandon on tech, Ben on speaking duties, Bridie, Megan and Matilda on catering, Alice and Tristan on schmoozing, Tessa on photos, Maddy doing a bit of everything and Alana and I on tickets (apologies to anyone I forgot). I thought that our small team all worked really well together and it was evident that we all performed our tasks to a very high standard.
I was especially proud of our Australiana session, which I think the vast majority of us were extremely worried about. I thought the Q&A was undoubtedly the most impressive feature of MIYFF and the fact that the conversation between Lauren, Andy, Andrew and Ben survived for over half an hour was a testament to the entire MIYFF team.
Thoughts on the overall experience
Film selection
In retrospect, I would change a lot of the way we went about selecting films. If there was to be a second MIYFF, I would put much more focus on curation rather than just selecting ‘good’ films. I think we should’ve focused much more on soliciting films and choosing films that fit under a theme. I think that delivering a curated selection of films that are in some way thematically, stylistically or culturally related is much more appealing than just simply screening an arbitrary selection of good short films. I realised this during my interview with Melinda where she pressed me on the curation process and during the Australiana session, which I felt was actually an experience rather then just a screening.
Collaboration
When reflecting on the studio, I realised that I had experienced what was quite a standard collaborative process, which included half the group doing a lot and the other half doing very little. However, in the case of MIYFF, which had a team of over 20 people, I thought that it was actually quite natural for a smaller portion of the class to bear the brunt of responsibility. All in all, I felt like the delegation of the jobs in the class was an effective invitation to either do a lot or very little work, and from what I have found in my experiences collaborating with other people, as long as everyone effectively does their job no matter how big or small, it’ll most likely be a success.
Publicity
I actually found the publicity side of MIYFF really insightful on a couple of different levels. In terms of my own publicity practice, I quickly realised what media did and did not engage with MIYFF. I had assumed that bigger media outlets such as Concrete Playground, Broadsheet and Concrete Playground would be really receptive of a concept like MIYFF but I quickly realised that sending out a media release less than two weeks killed any chance of coverage. This was the same for the newspapers and the ABC, that all responded to me stating that they needed to find out about the festival week’s before I contacted them. I also think that location is really important for a film festival to get press and I truly believe that if we were showing MIYFF at a cinema like The Capitol or ACMI we would’ve had a much bigger chance of gaining important coverage.
Readings
Who Is Organising It? Importance of Production and Team Members – Andrea Kuhn
In this chapter, Andrea Kuhn outlined the importance of the production stage of the festival. Kuhn expressed the importance of delegation, pre-production and planning surrounding budgeting, materials and manpower. Although I saw some parallels in the production phase of MIYFF and idea’s outlined by Kuhn, I thought that our lack of communication in some phases really let us down.
I couldn’t help but thinking that despite our class all forming into little subgroups, there was no real communication or planning about what we as a group were trying to achieve. It became quite obvious that despite Cerise’s intermittent guidance, we lacked someone connecting all our groups together. If there is a MIYFF 2.0, I think we would definitely need to promote someone to a ‘director’ role, who if anything, keeps everyone on task and connected.
I think that despite us naturally doing a number of things Kuhn suggested in the chapter including delegation of tasks and general planning, we needed someone to be the driving force behind the festival that every subgroup could report and answer to.
How to Successfully Promote Your Festival – Bohdana Rambousková
I think that Bohdana Rambousková’s chapter on festival promotion was a really accurate peice on film festival promotion and sadly we weren’t able to have the certain criteria outlined by Rambousková ready to press quickly enough to effectively promote our event.
“This rule especially applies when it comes to the media, who will only publish or broadcast news about your festival if they can easily understand what the event is about and are able to get directly to the point. Prepare a clear set of information to present to the media: ■ An exact title of the festival ■ Dates and locations ■ The aim of the festival (or an aim of the current edition) ■ Content (theme, programme categories, accompanying events, guests) ■ Who stands behind the festival (organisers, sponsors and partners)”
I remember Mia Falstein-Rush telling the class that she knew that her festival would be screening at ACMI a year before her festival took place. I think if we had a year to come up with this festival, where we could spend lots of time working on our location, location and theme we would’ve been much more successful in the media department.
I also think that our class only being on one day, which effectively meant that everyone worked on the festival for one day per week, which was definitely the case for a lot of people in the class, meant that our festival was too rushed to effectively tick all the boxes to make our festival easy to understand. Despite MIYFF having a really interesting background story, our inability to have a website, program, dates and locations and a spokesperson to present to the media a sufficient time before opening night meant we were always going to struggle.
Despite being a little negative about this, I am still thrilled with the media we got for MIYFF 1.0, I just think we could’ve gotten so much more!!
Festival participation
I am going to admit that I couldn’t make a film festival screening in the last two weeks of the semester but I did have one festival experience that was quite. It was well publicised that the Palace festival system was quite contrived and pretty much un-festival like, but my brief experience with the Irish Film Festival was actually really heartening.
I was at the Kino for a screening for work and the opening night gala for the Irish Film Festival was happing at the same time. I started talking to the people working the reception for the night and found they were all really passionate about Irish film and the festival. I had always thought that Palace festivals were nothing more than a money making machine but seeing a team of people so enthusiastic about quite a specific film festival was actually quite heartening.
I am going to the Sydney Film Festival in mid June though which is also really exciting, I read during the semester that it was an A list festival and I’m super keen to check it out.
Final thoughts
I thought this studio was one of the most demanding, stressful but also satisfying experiences i’ve had at university. I actually think it’s quite amazing that 24 people with varying film festival experience, could come together over 12 weeks and screen 25 films to over 80 people in two days. Despite all our shortcomings during the semester, the conflicting ideas and personalities, we were actually able to put on quite a fun event.
I really hope there is a MIYFF 2.0 and I genuinely think we might be onto something special with this one.
Lastly, I want to shout out Sean, Bridie and Megan, who all went above and beyond.