The Music Promotion

The music promotion was a great idea that was initially going to take place in the centre of Bath on a busy Saturday. There are often buskers dotted around Bath, who draw a lot of attention. The music event we had in mind was supposed to be the same, allowing us a great opportunity to not only publicise our event, but also allow us the opportunity to talk to people who stop and stand watching the music. Initially we had a band of three in mind (Singer/Guitar, Bass and Drums), as well as a banner with our logo displayed either behind them or in front on the floor. However, due to the council being reluctant to the idea of using amplification, not being given permission for the banner, as well as being refused permission for any type of event only days before the scheduled date (Saturday before the festival) we had to pull out and try to reorganise it. The council said that there was too much going on in town that weekend as Banana Republic and Bath Fashion week had already arranged some intense promotion events and locations. This was very disappointing as we had put so much time and effort in arranging this event.

So we re-scheduled it in the newly developed Southgate area of Bath, keeping it a lot more low-key than initially intended. It was a great loss to have lost the Saturday slot in exchange for a relatively quite thursday afternoon.

As you can see, it was a great performance that attracted a lot of attention. It was great that he was wearing our T-shirt and that all of the brochures and posters were all on the floor in front of him.

Fundraising

We have been granted £1500 from Bath Spa University to run this film festival. Obviously this amount of budget will not cover all of the costs of the festival as we have to secure the rights for the film, hire a number of venues as well as paying for printing, graphic designers and the prizes for our competition. This means that we will need to do a number of fundraisers leading up to the festival so we can invest more money into the marketing, which should hopefully generate more capitol through ticket sales.

We had the option of being able to choose with all of the money that we make from the festival. Last years students decided to donate the money to ClubFlix. This is a great company to donate the money to, especially as it is so closely linked with film by helping support young filmmakers. However, this year we decided to donate the money to a children's charity in Bristol in Bristol called the Wallace and Gromit Foundation. We all feel that this is a great local charity that has some links to film and television (in the title anyway), as well as being such a good cause. This has inspired us all involved in Line Up to try and make this as successful as possible so we can give the charity more money. Here is a few of the fundraising events that we held.

Cake sale
One great way of generating money is through a cake sale. The management team where primarily responsible for the organisation of the fundraising events, but there were a number of other people who played key roles in the success of these fundraising events. A number of of the group contributed in the baking of the cakes, designing flyers as well as manning the station throughout the day. Lets also not forget to mention the generous students of the university that couldn't resist the tempting cakes. Here are some pictures from the events.

As you can probably see, it was an absolute test of willpower to try and man the table for more than an hour. All of the cakes looked great! This was also a great opportunity to try and promote our festival, as we had the opportunity to talk with other students as well as offering our brochures.


Quiz Night

Again, this is an event that came up on the drawing board when we where brainstorming ideas for fundraising. It ended up being a great evening due to its vibrant atmosphere. We had managed to book Voka Revolutions's upstairs for a small deposit of £50. The only deal we needed to meet to get our deposit back was to secure a minimum of 50 people to attend the event. The quiz master was great! He really helped us promote the festival as well as the charity. Here is a quick video showing the event.

Success of the fund raising and events?

The Theme

We have recently been discussing potential ideas surrounding the theme of the festival. In one of our seminar meeting session we rattled it down to three, these included, Love, On the Road, Best films not to win an oscar. We then assigned each of these themes to three of the groups (acquisition, management and competition), while splitting the marketing group between the other three groups. We all had a week to try to come up with a convincing presentation that we would present back to the class. Thentation will determine the theme of the festival.

Love
The group that presented love came up with a convincing argument were they split love into four different categories, representing romance, friendship, family......... This was presented very well, especially when they were faced with the large problem that Love is associated with women. This obviously makes it difficult to market as it cuts of half of our audience. They tried to come up with a different slant of the theme, trying not to solely use the romantic side of love. Although it was a good effort, and the concept would allow us to use almost any film, the majority of the class felt that it would scare off the men.

On the Road
This theme was seemed to be the best option, although one drawback lied in the fact that the title could leave the general public confused as to what type of films would be on show. Another bad point surrounding this is the type of films that spring to mind when you know what the theme means, typically these include, Dumb and Dumber and Easy Rider. The films can be deemed as very 'samey'. One of the possible solutions to this theme, was the idea of the road movie being used metaphorically, for films that involve a journey.

Best films not to win an oscar
This is a good idea, but was not presented very well. One significant problem with this theme lies in the fact that many of the films would have been cult films, which is not what the majority of us wanted. As many of us study film, we want to put in some good films that the general public might not have heard of, instead of cult films that everybody had seen and most probably have in their DVD collection.

In Summary
The 'Road Film' was the overall winner. This theme allows us to show a large number of films that fall within a number of different genres. It will also allow us to show some non-comercial art-house films for younger audience, while also allowing us to show some classics that might appeal to an older audience.

The Groups

When we first joined this module we were given the opportunity to get involved in the areas that we wanted. Our module co-ordinator, Terrence, suggested that we have five different groups based on last years structure. These groups included:

1. Marketing 
2. Competition 
3. Acquisition
4. Social Networking
5. Management

After assembling ourselves into these groups, it was clear that we were running low on Marketing and Social Networking. It was agreed that we merge these groups together as they were linked to some degree. Social networking is a branch of marketing. Now that we had our groups, we could really begin to plan our festival. All we needed next was a theme.

First Entry: The Update

This is the First blog for the Line-Up film festival. First I will begin by briefly defining what the festival is and what it' s aims are. We are a set of students from Bath Spa University that are doing a practical module in organising a film festival. Last year was the first time that this module ran and it was extremely successful. This module does what many don't, in that it enables us the students to get hands on with practical tasks. Every problem that arises have to be sorted out by the students, with minimal assistance from the course co-ordinator. We are given a small budget from the university (not enough for the whole event) and are given the challenge of raising the rest through fundraising events. Any profit that we are left with after the festival are donated to charity. Last years charity was Clubflix, who are a small local company that aim to get children involved in film.

This Blog has been set up to offer you the chance to see how this event is being organised, with all the challenges and problems that arise. We will be offering some visual video footage from some of our meetings along with pictures in later blogs. Blogging is great way for us to show such multi media without clogging our website. We also are on Facebook and Twitter which can be accessed from a link at the bottom of our website.