In early May, Izzy and I had the opportunity to curate and run a short film screening at Atlas Cinema, as part of our collective bugbyte. We started the planning process at the end of March, after we’ve received confirmation that our screening proposal had been approved, by creating a list of films that we’d like to screen. We also offered two of our filmmaker friends the opportunity to guest curate a few films for our lineup, which they accepted.
The biggest hurdle of the process was to contact the filmmakers to obtain permission to screen their films, as we didn’t have a lot of time to find another film to replace one if they rejected us. While the majority of the filmmakers were very happy for us to screen their films, it was still quite nerve-wracking for me to reach out to them and wait in suspense for their response. We also had one film on our list that was created by a well-known director in Japan and currently in the festival circuit, and we cold-emailed him in hopes to get a response. Unfortunately, we didn’t receive any contact from him and eventually had to make do with the existing line-up.
Once the screening lineup was confirmed, we started creating the promotional material for the event, including posters, social media posts, screening program, and additional merch designs. While we mostly relied on Instagram to promote the event, we also stuck posters up around the CSM animation studios, as well as asked Shaun to share our poster with the first-year students. Ultimately, I think that our first public screening was a success, with a good turn-out and everyone really enjoying the selection of films, despite the hectic nature of planning it while balancing working on our graduation film.
Having never organised an event like this before, it was definitely a valuable learning experience to understand the amount of behind-the-scenes work involved with the whole process. I don’t particularly enjoy posting on social media (I get very stressed about it), but it was necessary to get more people aware that this was happening. This is still something we could continue to work on for next events to get more people to come, as the attendees at this screening were mostly people we knew. We were also able to use this venue through an open call on social media as the space will be closing at the end of June, so we will have to research into affordable/free venues for any future screenings. Overall, it was very rewarding to see all of our hard work come together in the end, and I hope to run more events as part of bugbyte in the future!
