I believe that over the course of the pre-production and running of the New Normal International Film Festival, we achieved many successes during our learning of how to conceive and mount a film festival. One of the festival’s successes that was significant to me personally, was the increase of engagement with the social media pages, these being Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. On the 6th of June, the final day of the film festival, the Instagram page I had been running reached 50 followers, and the Twitter page reached 10 followers. This was achieved 100% organically. The Facebook page reached 238 likes as well as 257 people following the page. This was achieved both through paid advertising and organically. I spent $166AUD on Facebook paid advertising over four advertisements to increase the reach and engagement of our film festival. Overall, I am very satisfied with the outcome of the social media pages. I spent a lot of time and effort thinking of, researching, sourcing and creating content as well as making sure to post daily to all platforms to ensure engagement would increase. I conducted some research on how to run these Facebook advertisements. As I had never done something like this before, I was seeking some guidance with this. I am satisfied with the success of these platforms. In the future, I would like to develop some sponsored Instagram posts. However, as paid advertising was new to me during the production of this film festival, I found it most successful to focus one platform’s paid advertising service.
Other successes of the New Normal International Film Festival include the successful live streaming of the films themselves. This was achieved over nights two and three. However, this brings me to one of the festival’s shortcomings. On the first night of the film festival, we experienced some ‘unprecedented’ technical difficulties. I believe this was due to the films being streamed directly from another online source provided by the filmmakers. This was fixed on the second and third nights of the festival by the films being downloaded and then live-streamed as they were playing from the downloaded source. A shortcoming experienced that was significant to me personally during the pre-production of the film festival was when the second paid Facebook advertisement went live. When selecting the features of this paid advertisement, I selected it to focus on engagement. However, this resulted in the single post reaching a high engagement rate with the post reaching almost 6,000 engagements. However, the Facebook page itself did not receive any new likes or follows as a result of this post and advertisement, despite the single post reaching a large number of engagements. I would not use this feature to promote future film festivals because I am not satisfied with the results. I believe the use of directing the post to visiting our website gained more overall page engagement.
Bohdana Rambousková’s article ‘How to Successfully Promote Your Festival’ in Setting Up a Human Rights Film Festival outlines the idea of “you can lose potential audience members if you try to introduce the festival to the public in all its complexity.” When promoting the New Normal International Film Festival, initially, as we hadn’t decided on the program until quite late during the production stage, it was difficult to “introduce the festival to the public in all its complexity”. Therefore, I believe this ensured we didn’t provide the public with too much information regarding the film festival. Although, this was unintentional, I believe it worked out for the best, as our initial social media posts allowed the pages to gain interest and engagement, as well as a following established, before important announcements regarding the festival were made.
Peter Debruge’s article ‘The Problem With Virtual Film Festivals’ in Variety outlines the idea of filmmakers not wanting their work to be streamed online as part of virtual film festivals. One main reason for this is that the film isn’t able to be distributed the same way, and reaching the same media coverage and market, if the film was to be screened as part of a traditional film festival. As outlined by Debruge, it is also very difficult to achieve a “world premiere” in the online platform. The New Normal International Film Festival was inspired by the unprecedented times brought on by the COVID-19 global pandemic. As a result of this, our content was surrounding this idea of ‘the new normal’. Although we were accepting submissions for our festival, I believe it was a challenge to outsource some of the films from filmmakers. I have also learnt from this that filmmakers can be apprehensive towards showing their film in an online festival simply because they don’t want it to be publicly available online to watch for free. This can be a concern for filmmakers as discovered through the creation of the New Normal International Film Festival.
Glen Falkenstein’s article ‘Film Festivals Bridging the Void’ discusses the idea that audiences are able to participate in such film festivals despite many constraints such as their geographical location and otherwise unable to attend in person that would normally. “I suspect in the future these would be good avenues to reach out to audiences who are unable to engage with the festival.” These “good avenues” are referring to virtual film festivals. From the creation of the ‘New Normal International Film Festival’, we have been able to successfully provide a sense of community and fellowship among film lovers worldwide at a time of such uncertainty. I believe that in this way, we are bridging the void between cinema and individuals worldwide through the creation of our film festival and many other online film festivals worldwide.
Another media studio’s website, ‘Demagogues, Doubters and Douchebags’ attempts to convey the idea that sound (specifically voice-over) conveys different meaning when used alongside different visual tools. I discovered this idea through assignment two for their studio, where students were asked to create a new sequence of images for an existing voice-over piece from a film. The piece ‘Marten Needs A Mouse’ by Jarvis Ho and Martin Ho cleverly uses a voice-over by David Attenborough and provides it with new meaning, contrary to the traditional nature documentary you would expect with such a voice-over. As a result, this shows us that the use of a voice-over in film, can be used in many other ways, opposed to typically being used in a documentary film. This piece alongside many others developed by this media studio successfully conveys the idea that the use of a voice-over can be used in many different contexts and genres.
Bohdana Rambousková, ‘How to Successfully Promote Your Festival’ in Setting Up a Human Rights Film Festival, vol. 2, Human Rights Film Network, Prague, 2015, P97-114.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Mssmb_RjBmw6Vb38tSKnS94Ts2OvDCi3/view
Glen Falkenstein, ‘Film Festivals Bridging the Void’, Festevez, 1 May 2020.
https://festevez.com/interviews/2020/148670/film-festivals-bridging-the-void/
Peter Debruge, ‘The Problem With Virtual Film Festivals’, Variety, April 30, 2020.