Conclusions

Rebecca Little

Unfortunately, homework from other classes kept me from really enjoying the festival, outside of working on this project. Plus, I’m not the sort of person who’s into big parties, so the after party wasn’t too alluring to me, believe it or not. As far as the project goes, the Monday after Spring break, I got my first round of stress-related nausea. Getting to see the film before everyone else at the festival was really cool, though, and handing out the fliers was fun. Two of the people who stopped to talk to us were musicians promoting their own bands in a similar fashion, and we exchanged fliers. My group members were great, too, which also helped handing out fliers and meeting to talk about the project more fun.

I would say that I learned promoting a film is a lot of hard work, but I kind of already expected that. Promoting a movie for the Florida Film Festival is a little more difficult than I expected, if only because they don’t know the show times until a couple of weeks in advance. A lot of groups and possible promotion areas already have their programming all figured out long before that. If a person has an in with a group, or radio station, etc, or a big name, it makes it a lot easier. Even then, though, based on one of the group presentations, I learned that even having an in with a radio station doesn’t automatically mean getting on the air. In the instance of the group getting the promotion with the restaurant, however, I learned that if a film has the right hook a person doesn’t necessarily need a name or a connection to get it out there. It’s a very complicated process.

Marc Maggio

The Florida Film Festival was the first film festival I have been to. It was an amazing experience and I would like to continue to attend it annually and start going to other film festivals. I learned that to get people in the seats you need to go out and spread the word. If you hand fliers out at five different locations and only five people attend, then that’s five more people that came to see the movie. If you didn’t go out, then it would have been five less people. You need to go out and spend the time to get people in the seats.

Jonathan Heuslien

Working on this project was a challenge for me in particular and for us as a group because all three of us are by nature introverted people. There is nothing wrong with this, it is just how we are. None of us are at all comfortable approaching people with something to sell. I can fake it the best, so I took the point: I was in charge of talking with Jim and the various sources we contacted.

It was very much like working to market our own film in that we did not have many restrictions (at first) on who we marketed to. We also had the opportunity to create our own blog and press release/cover letter and make contact with whomever we thought we should. The limitations that came later were constricting and disappointing and a bit of an annoyance (I still get emails for the bipolar support groups I joined). Supplied materials would have been really helpful, but we did our best with what we had.