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This year the UFILMS film festival is back, but this year it's a little different, this year the festival will take place online and will be 100% virtual. This is due to the current COVID-19 situation meaning that the festival can not go on in person. The film festival is the biggest part of our year here at college as we get to show off everything that we have made that year to an actual live audience on a theatre sized screen. That's why we didn't want to go without it this year, as we wanted to show our audience what we had made this year. Excluding our final short films as these sadly never got to be made due to college closing due to the coronavirus. Instead, we decided to create mini short films shot inside our homes while we were stuck in lockdown so that we still got to create a film to show at the film festival. The theme for these films was isolation and they have to be 30 seconds to 3 minutes long and be shot all inside of your house.
Last Years Festival -
At last years festival, I had many jobs, one of them being one of the main people in charge of the whole festival it was my responsibility to make sure that everything was going to plan, things such as the venue was booked and ready for the night, getting the films together ready to show, designing the marketing campaign and also selling tickets.
Last year's festival was amazing and we got to show off our work to a live audience, we had a local band perform a set and provided food and drink for the quests.
It was a lot of hard work to plan and prepare for it, this included weeks of planning what we were going to show, where we were going to show it, and making sure that everything was ready in time for our two-night festival.
It also included days of labour, this was because we had to design the threate to how we wanted it to look for the festival. We had to paint the entire floor black so that we could get the lighting effects that we wanted.
We also had to quickly learn how to use the equipment for the sound and lights so that we could play films and have nice lighting on the night. The person in charge of this at college left days before the festival so it was up to us to try our best and put on a show. I am very proud of how fast we learnt how to use the audio and lights and I think the finished product looked great! |
| The UFILMS Film Festival 2019 |
All of this work was extremely fun as we all had to work together and in a couple of weeks plan and design this whole festival!
Me and laura also did an interview with a woman from the marketing team at college so that more people knew about the festival and attend.
This was also my first time at showing off my work to an audience so this was a great experience to see how an audience reacted to my film and I was able to get actual audience feedback from the people who watched.
Due to COVID19 there was no way that we could do the same thing this year, we were going to have to think of something else or just call off the festival...
We thought hard and came up with the idea of doing the film festival online across all the Ufilms social media platforms. This way we could still screen what we had made this year to our audience. We did some research about how we were going to go about moving the festival to be 100% online and found that other film festivals and film award shows have also moved online to make sure they can still go ahead even with COVID19. For example Cannes film festival has also moved online and they are doing the following to make sure their festival still works.
- virtual pavilions for institutions
- video meetings
- online screenings
For this year's film festival, we had to plan the whole thing over zoom calls and we were not able to be in college to plan it properly. This actually turned out a lot better than expected as we got a lot of planning done per call and were able to decide as a team what we wanted to do for this year's film festival.
My role this time at the festival was to design the marketing campaign for the social media platforms, below are my designs for the poster and social media idents.
We also did a competition called teamwork challenge, this was where we asked the audience to form a group to create a video which they have all worked on together WITHOUT meeting up in person, this was going to challenge them to work as a team without actually working together in person.
