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pym guide to: running a film festival
A Film Festival is a great way to build relationships between youth groups in your region, and encourage and develop the creativity of young people in your church. It also can give the opportunity for emerging leaders to to get involved in organizing a regional event. The Wellington Joint Youth Ministry Committee has been running an annual Film Festival for a few years now, and have given some insights into the workings of a successful event. Sorry, this isn’t a formula for the perfect event – so don’t try and replicate it! However feel free to take some of the ideas raised here and put them in use in your own context – and then share your own experiences.
The basic concept is as follows: get the youth groups to make five minutes movies on topics of their choice (points are awarded for Christian ideaology). Have a big night of fun where you show them on the big screen. Pretty simple!
About two months before, we got an organizing crew together. This consisted of some more experienced leaders and some teenagers who were just starting out. If you have Going Somewhere graduates in your region, this is a great way to get them involved.
Venue
In 2005, we decided to use a large church hall as our venue. In other years, venues have included a local arty film theatre, Victoria University Theatre and an art gallery. There are pro’s and con’s to both options – halls offer more flexability, are cheaper, and often have better parking; wheras venue’s are flasher and mean you don’t have to put as much time and energy into decorating and organization. The most important considerations when deciding your venue are size, your budget, what you venue will let you do (some don’t allow food, or insist you use in-house caterers, or need you to be in and out at certain times), and how much time and energy you have to put into making a hall look nice.
Factors to consider when using a church hall:
Data projector, Video player/laptop, Screen (can everyone see? Well?), Sound systme, seating, decorations
Factors to consider when hiring a theatre:
Hire early – bookings are often full, ensure ticket sales will cover hireage costs adequately, allow time for set-up and pack-down in the hireage times, space for people to mingle before and afterwards, does the venue have any special requirements? (eg. Ushers as fire wardens).
The rules and guidelines for entries in 2005 were as follows:
1. All videos must be no longer in duration than 5 minutes. Any entries longer than this will be played only until the 5 minute mark.
2. Entries must be entered into one of the following categories:
Comedy
Drama
Music Video
Kiwiana
Real life feature
‘Other’
NB. Categories have changed every year, and have also included the following: Mystery/whodunnit, Wildlife Documentary, Elderly person feature (eg. Interview), Religious feature, Courtroom drama, Infomercials
3. The content for all movies must meet the mandatory requirements for a ‘G’ rating as stated in the ‘Films, Videos and Publications Classification Act’ 1993.
4. Persons aged 25 years and older must not have any direct involvement in the creation of any entry.
5. All entries must be clearly labeled with the title, category and group name of the video. Each entry should be on a video or CD.
Video – must be at the start of a new tape in standard play (not long play)
CD – ‘rendered out’ or saved as .AVI only (no DVDs or VCD). Use ‘cinepac by radius’ codec. Any questions about technical stuff call Jason (number given).
6. All categories will be judged on the basis of:
Content (30%)
Photography (20%)
Creativity (30%)
Presentation (20%)
7. Due to time constraints, only 2 entries per youth group are guaranteed to be shown. Please prioritize your entries. Others will be shown at the judges’ discretion.
8. Entries must be received by Monday 22nd August.
9. The judges’ decision is final. All correspondence will be found amusing, but will not affect the overall outcome.
The rules about only two entries per youth group was a new one this year, due to some groups entering five or more films, which is not only very stressful for the leaders, takes up a lot of screen time. This will only become a concern once the festival starts to get big. We’ve found it’s better to encourage people to make less films of a better standard. Films are sent in a few days before so they can be viewed to check content and pick spot prizes.
Publicity
This is a key element of organizing a good film festival. You need to get the word out there to encourage people to make films, and to bring their whole crew along to watch (even if they haven’t made a film). This can be done using a variety of mediums – letters, emails, posters for people to put on their walls. We’ve found that a letter, followed up by a personal phone call, then a poster mail out to those who are interested, plus email reminders in the week or two before works really well. The personal phone call is crucial. People often don’t read stuff sent to them by people they’re never met or talked to. We tried to pre-sell as many tickets as possible, to give us an indication of how many people are coming, and also get people to commit to coming. We also had door sales. Tickets were $5 (you may need to charge more if you are paying a lot for your venue).
Theme
We have experimented with having a theme for the night. This may be reflected in the film categories, the commercial film showed, decoration of the theatre, and we also encouraged participants to dress according to the theme. These have included: Kiwiana at the Beach (dress theme only) The Oscars (dress theme only) Friday 13th (Ghostbusters), Safari (The Lion King), Superheroes (Superman).
Budget
If you can find someone or a group to underwrite the event, it gives you a lot more security. This means that if for some reason no one comes on the night or you have some huge unforeseen expense, the organizers aren’t left footing the bill. Of course the aim is to break even, but it’s good to have that behind you. Also, someone will need to be willing to put up the capital before the event as you won’t have any money until after you sell the tickets (which may not be until the night) and there are a lot of things that you can’t get invoices for. They can be reimbursed afterwards (make sure you keep the receipts).
Prizes
It’s great to be able to hand out prizes to reward those who have done really well and encourage those who’ve tried really hard. We asked all our friends, Mum’s, Dad’s, uncles, brothers and sisters, people in our churches etc. if they worked somewhere which would give us free stuff. We also hit the main shopping streets of town, with an official looking letter and big smiles to ask for vouchers or items to be donated as prizes. We found people like it better if you give out lots of little (and sometimes silly) prizes rather than a couple of big ones.
Judges
We usually have between three and five judges. It’s good to have a mix of different people with different skills. People with some technical film making knowledge are useful, as are those who have an eye for drama or story telling. It’s also important to have at least one person who knows the regional scene well, because you want to recognize effort as well as excellence and they will be able to see that. Youth leaders who are particularly associated with one church, especially if they were involved in making a film, often do not enjoy judging. This is because if their group wins, all the other groups complain of bias. If their group doesn’t win, the people in it give them a hard time. They are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Once you do find your judges, it is great to make them feel really special on the night. Give them comfy chairs, a prime viewing position, glasses of water, free food from the candy bar, and make sure they know what they’re supposed to be doing and not standing around feeling awkward. Make sure you thank them nicely too.
Food
We have sometimes run a café/candy bar on the night in an adjacent space. This can be organised by one youth group as a fundraiser or just by the film fest crew. It was open beforehand, during intermission and afterwards. Things that have been sold include sold coffee, hot chocolates, fizzy drink, chippies, $1 mix of lollies and chocolate bars. This provided the necessary energy for the evening, but also made some of the awkward-standing-around times more casual and comfortable. In 2005 we experimented with giving out free popcorn. This was very very popular. We managed to get a sponsor to give us microwave popcorn at half price (which was still more expensive than popcorn machine popcorn, but was way easier and could also be given away as prizes). We ate 15kg between 240 people, which is a lot of popcorn! Only do this if you are able to clean up afterwards – there was a lot of it on the floor! We also provided a free supper and sausage sizzle afterwards – it was great for mixing and mingling because the different groups now have something in common to talk about. Because we had it at a church hall, we asked people from the host church to bring a plate and also bought some food ourselves.
Format
Here is an example of one regional Film Festival held in Wellington in 2005: [note: we booked the venue from 3pm onwards]
3pm Organisers begin setting up – chairs, decorations, the screen, sound, lighting, judges table, judges deliberating room, cafe
6.45 Young people started arriving – redeem/buy tickets, buy food/drinks, grab free popcorn, mingle and talk
7.10 Played a funny short movie (we used the one off ‘The Incredibles’)
7.20 MC’s kicked off the evening with introcution, who’s in the house, fire exit’s & toilets info
7.30 Started playing the movies. Between each movie we had an short activity to give the judges time to score – lolly scrambles, film trivia questions with spot prizes, promotion for other regional events etc.
8.30 Intermission
8.40 Rest of the movies
9.20 Judges leave to deliberate. Crowd entertainment included: dance off run by local dance group, film trivia, presentation of spot prizes picked during previewing of films, best dressed guy/girl awards.
9.50 Judges presented awards – winner of each category, best actor/actress, best first time entry, 3rd, 2nd, 1st places.
10.15 Supper & mingling
10.40 Hometime. Clean up crew got to work
In previous years we have screened a commercial film after our amateur creations. We investigated copyright laws about screening movies in public, and discovered that no one actually cares, as long as it isn’t a new release, and the feature film isn’t publicised widely. As the film festival has grown and got more entries, we have cut this out.
To check out photos from Wellington Film Festival 2005, click here