Publication and Artefact:
Final Festival Reflection:
After the festival weekend, overall, I am very happy with how Melbourne WebFest went. There were certainly many elements of the festival which didn’t go how I planned them to, but I learnt from these experiences, and often was able to correct them for later in the festival. One thing which really helped was the amount of planning I had done for the venues with regard to how the nights would run. On the actual day of the events, I ended up running around completing so many last-minute tasks that my attention was often taken off from the show. This meant that items like run sheets were very useful.
A major issue we faced during the festival weekend was participation from the class. While everyone was present for opening night, by the Sunday day sessions, it was the same familiar faces who were all feeling very burnt out. I was present at every session of the festival, as were a couple of other people. Next time, I will probably take a few sessions off schedule, so that I will have more energy for the rest of the festival. As a class I thought we all worked really well together. We did a great job of identifying everyone’s skillsets and allocating them to that role. For example, some members of the class were very skilled in photography, and they were able to showcase that on opening night, while others were incredible at design, and worked on the branding for the whole festival. Each team also had a lot of trust in the other teams, which meant it made it easy to create a consistent image and look for the festival.
As the venue coordinator, once I had a general idea of the venues I wanted to book, I gave a presentation to the class. This was to get a consensus on whether they would be suitable for the events. The class generally was quite happy with all the venues. We originally planned to use Treasury theatre on closing night and Kaleide theatre on the gala night, but when Storey Hall got back to us, their quote was cheaper than the other venues. In reflection, I’m very happy with all the venues that we chose. The staff were very accommodating of Melbourne WebFest, and they also gave us quite a large amount of flexibility in the running of the show. We were able to rearrange the seating into tables for the closing night to fill more space and make it feel more like an awards show. They also let us rearrange the foyer to create our own bar and merchandise stand.
The main problem which occurred during the running of the festival was miscommunication between the production team and the programming team. The programming team gave the production team a list of the films that we planned to screen at each session, alongside a timestamp of how long each film was. The files on Film Freeway didn’t actually match up with the running times they gave us, as we hadn’t been told to cut anything. We only realised this when our gala night of screenings was running around an hour overtime and we couldn’t work out why. We actually had to ask the audience who had come to see their films screened because we no longer had time to screen them all. This made many audience members upset, as they had bought tickets to see a specific category such as drama, only to be told we were skipping most of them. The issues extended on this night to the venue sound. We couldn’t work out how to turn the speakers on which were facing the audience, so as a result, the only sound which was transmitted was from a small foldback speaker onstage, facing the performer. This meant the sound would bounce all around the auditorium, making it hard to catch words.
The screening problems continued the next day with our legacy screenings. The two people who had been trained on how to operate the technology were not present on this day, which meant myself and a member of the programming team had to learn how to operate all the software in an incredibly short timeframe while the audience was waiting outside. We also discovered that the legacy screening sessions were only twenty minutes in length, despite being advertised as a one-hour session. Overall, the festival was a fantastic learning experience. I met so many great people with skills in areas which I knew nothing about. I think if I went to this festival again, I would put more time into preparation and testing the venues, to make sure we were all as prepared as possible for the nights.