Criticism Session Reflection
Right now, our film festival-MIYFF has entered the final countdown stage. For our class in week 9, we need to prepare a small informal presentation to tell everyone and special guest Rohan Spong and Erin Rosenberg about each team’s progress. In the “criticism session”, we showed our Chinese trailer to everyone. We were nervous on that day. After all, this is the first time that we have invited everyone to watch our works which we spent much time. I don’t know if it will be accepted by the audience and feedback from them and Rohan also made our nervous. So, the whole of our team knew the importance of this ‘criticism session’, every bit of advice and feedback was absolutely crucial.
Fortunately, everyone was interested in our second trailer and we also got useful advice from Rohan and Erin. For example, the first international trailer shows the two male figures almost disinterested so might not be a wise choice whereas the second international trailer shows two people genuinely interested in going and putting their phones, and use social media away and connecting over a social event. So, first one may need a bit more editing to feel more upbeat like the second one. At the same time, Rohan also made some valuable suggestions on the main trailer, like the main trailer is not as inclusive and may alienate people who are not mega cinephile or who are not as well versed in the cinematic side of things, so should show different people of gender, age, race.
In addition, another great idea came from Rohan. We should test all the equipment one week before the event. Although everything was normal at the time, it was likely that this was not the case on the day of the festival, so testing equipment was a very important priority.
I think I am very lucky to get valuable advice from Rohan and Erin this time because we are all students, we don’t have these extra experiences, so it is invaluable to get such detailed face to face advice from industry experts.