A Night at the Movies, Part II

Point of clarifications, because my prior post was perhaps not clear, with respect to The Night at the Movies...

There is no question in my mind that this goes on and we learn and adjust. I think last night was pretty awesome. I mean, we watch these great student films on the massive Norris screen. We partied and celebrated the love of movies, both watching and making.

Things to work on:

1. Nomination Process. Part of the original plan was to have this initial screening and inspire others to look for and make movies that could be part of future screenings. Now that we've started A Night of Movies, hopefully the word will spread and nominations will fly in from a wider swath around school. We can have as many screenings as quality movies, in theory. That process will start in a couple of weeks.

2. Promotion/Advertising/Getting People in the Seats. As much as we tried to avoid the trappings, I suppose it is somewhat inevitable that the only audience one can rely upon for a screening is the people involved with the movies. Thus, I feel a wider nomination process will increase attendence, as many of these films were by a particular social group within the cinema school. A wider amount of movies, a wider audience.

But beyond that, we are also going to attempt to find a bigger audience in a different way. A) Utilizing the "Tipping Point" idea and promoting/selling the event to select people in school who will get behind the project and promote it. We tried to do this for this project by contacting TAs and friends. What I realize, in hindsight, is that a lot of the people promoting the event were inter-promoting, that is, when Chuck promotes the movies, it is most likely to get me and Kevin into the movie; when I promote the movies, it gets Kevin and Chuck; when Kevin promotes the movie, it gets me and Kevin. Thus, our promotion attempts overlap and become circular. We need to make an outreach to other "social groups." This will need to be managed with care and done in advance, maybe going so far as to recruiting other people to help in the movie programming.

Note: it seemed as though we got a good deal of first year students, which I think were a response to the TA emails. Other TA emails probably we not taken as seriously, simply because you look up to TAs more your first semester, and then the next couple semesters when you're TAing classes of people who are your TAs and it all sort of loses it's allure.

B) Trying to add a level of sophistication ie, outside the normal cinema crowd...perhaps reaching out to faculty we like, or other departments in school. I made a small attempt to get the word out to the MFA Fine Art students and Business school, but there are probably much more thorough ways to go about it.

C) Getting Cinema school backing. We can tell the dean, the public affairs office, and all the "other" people around the cinema school. Now that we've started something successful, people will jump on the bandwagon and get into it.

3. Technical Improvements. The big failure of this screening, that no one probably noticed, was that we were unable to play the movies off a single (or two) DV tapes. The exported tape was done the night before and the error not discovered until we didn't have time to re-export. We were forced to screen off the original tapes. Therefore, we were unable to control overall sound levels and edit out credits until the end. It also hampered the screening order and end credits. We will do it earlier next time and use better equipment (if we can get our hands on it).

4. Programming/Ordering. A consensus seems to be shorter is better. Or, if there is a significant length difference, some sort of brochure for the audience, so they know what they are getting into. Part of me thinks - well, they know they are coming for an hour and 15 minutes, so what's the problem. They should be able to sit through movies we select...but I don't think the short film audience is conditioned that way. Anyhow, we need to consider the rhythm of the screening or whether a program is necessary.

That's about it for my notes. I'd be happy to hear any other thoughts by those who went, or even those who didn't...

Update: A competitor of A Night of Movies? It looks like a much bigger scale, but which films would you rather spend an 1:15 watching...as in you have DVDs of each and which one gets scratched first? And as in, which is the bigger spectacle. I predict, already, that I will be talking trash at the screening...why? the free, good booze, and the fact that a lot of people I know will probably attend who missed a Night at the Movies.