BACKGROUND

The Main Street Film Fest is an annual flm festival held in Maryville, Missouri. The fes-
tival features the best of short flms, music videos, and documentaries produced by students
from Northwest Missouri State University. The event was frst held in 2010 and again 2012. I
personally oversaw the planning, promoting, and coordination of the 2013 Main Street Film
Fest.
For the 2012 and 2013 festivals, the event was held at the Hangar, of of Main Street in
Maryville. Each year has seen a substantial increase of attendees, as well as in the number of
productions shown. The 2013 festival had 14 flms and documentaries shown, with over 130 in
attendance throughout the event.
PERSONAL I NVOL VEMENT
My involvement in the 2013 Main Street Film Fest began in December 2012. My friend
and director Clayton Scott approached me online that month about undertaking another
Main Street Film Fest and making it an annual event. Scott had previously coordinated the
2010 and 2012 festivals with little planning and preparation. I undertook the responsibilities
shortly after his request in the hopes of making the event a grander and better promoted
event than it had been before.
TARGETI NG
The frst step I took in planning for the event was determining the most appropriate
date. I settled upon Friday, April 26, 2013 as the target date due to a few factors. Firstly, the
afternoon/evening of Friday was typically an open timeframe in Maryville, with little events
planned at Northwest Missouri State or in the town. Factor two was that the weekend of the
26th sat right before fnals week at Northwest; students typically avoided traveling home be-
fore fnals week and chances were high that there would be more students turning out for the
festival.
My next step was to gather fellow students in premiering their works at the festival. I
largely targeted students in the Broadcasting major at the university, who were most likely to
have flms already prepared or would soon be creating new flms. With a sufcient number of
students and flms on board, I established a fnal due date for all projects to be submitted to
myself in time for the festival.
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As my fnal targeting plans took shape, I next moved into the task of establishing pro-
motional channels for the Main Street Film Fest.
BEGI NNI NG OF MARKETI NG & PROMOTI ONS
The previous Main Street Film Fests were thrown together last minute, with only a
matter of a couple of weeks to promote each event. I sought to avoid this complication as it
would hurt chances of bringing in a larger audience.
At the beginning of my involvement, the only promotional channel that existed for the
Main Street Film Fest was an underused Facebook group. Despite a fair number of members
within the group, I realized this was a poor method of reaching out to the intended audience:
students and local citizens. I devised a solution, wherein I created a Facebook page dedicated
wholly to the Main Street Film Fest. The previously established Facebook group was retooled
as a background channel for those involved with the festival, using the group as a means of
communicating essential information.
L OGO
With the creation of the Facebook page, I created a specifc logo for the festival. The
2012 Main Street Film Fest had a logo, of sorts, created to promote the event, in the form of
a poster. In keeping with the style of the 2012 poster, I kept the same basic idea for 2013, but
enhanced diferent aspects.
Main St. Film Fest Facebook group
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The new logo was designed specifcally for social media
use. Since nearly all social media avatars are square, I cre-
ated the logo to ft within the square, conveying the basic
information of the event.
I also created a generalized logo to use once the event
had concluded. This logo did away with the event informa-
tion and instead included merely Northwest Missouri State
University in place of the event information.
COVER PHOTO
As well as creating the logo, I also designed a cover photo to be used for Facebook
and YouTube. The original design of this cover image featured screen captures from four of
the flms to be featured at the flm festival. Each screen capture was assigned a specifc color,
which was created using PhotoShop. I quickly decided that for all further promotional images,
each image would be assigned a specifc color.
The original cover photo also featured the text Main St. Film Fest, with Main St. larg-
er than the succeeding text. This was done to elicit a stronger memorization of main street
in the viewer, thereby ensuring recall better.
Like the logo, the cover photo was changed after the conclusion of the flm festival.
Though right two screen captures were kept intact, but the preceding two were changed. I
devised the concept of eyes being the telling point in the overall cover photo design. Initially,
2013 Main St. Film Fest logo
Original cover photo
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the text Main St. Film Fest was displayed at the bottom of the image, but I realized that this
would not be visible in a Facebook cover photo lest someone clicked and enlarged the pho-
to.
I again altered the cover photo, keeping the graphic design within the confnes of
Facebooks specifc measurements for cover photos. And in keeping with the theme of eyes
being the drawing point, I aligned each screen capture to have the eyes of each individual in-
line with each other. The imaginary line was aligned across the optical center axis of the cover
photo, following psychology principles of pleasure. Past research has shown that people fnd
objects aligned just above true center to be more visually pleasing; I followed this principle to
ensure a pleasing design.
PROMOTI ONAL PHASE
The earliest promotional piece created for the Main Street Film Fest was a set of be-
hind-the-scenes photos from The Looking Glass, a short flm created by the Independent
Filmmakers Club at Northwest. The photo series garnered little attention at the time, due to
the small number of likes the Main Street Film Fest page had at the time.
As before, the earliest pieces created for promotion were the logo and cover photo,
which were pushed out a month in advance of the event. More attention was drawn to these
pieces, which were lightly promoted for the proceeding two weeks.
By mid-April, I began pushing out new promo pieces for the festival. Two new pieces
-- one a screen capture and another from a photo shoot created by a friend -- were posted
to the Facebook page. The same day, I created a Facebook event for the 2013 Main Street
Updated cover photo, following optical center and eyeline principles
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Film Fest, which I intended to use as the main area for pushing out information specifc for
the event.
With each passing day, I created new promo images to share on social media. I pri-
marily utilized screen captures from each of the flms to be shown, though obtaining images
from all flms was not possible due to some flms still unfnished up to the established due
date. As noted with the cover photo(s), each promo image followed a specifc color or colors
that I assigned. Once the overall tone of the image was created, I overlayed each image with
a screen of celluloid, which created a flmic look. This created an almost a grindhouse feel to
the images, akin to the posters used for Grindhouse ficks Planet Terror and Death Proof.
Other promotional materials were created by fellow friends and flmmakers for the
festival. Among these included pieces for short flms Take Me Home and Soul Funk Crusad-
ers. Some teaser trailers were also created, which were shared through the Facebook page.
Another method used to promote the Main Street Film
Fest were taking hold of popular memes at the time. The frst
of these memes used the well-known Hey Girl memes featur-
ing Ryan Gosling. I later used the Overly Attached Girlfriend,
Brace Yourselves, and Worlds Most Interesting Man memes
to help gain interest.
As the date for
the event was quickly
approaching, I began
teasing more behind-
the-scenes shots, fea-
turing work occurring on flms that were to be shown,
as well as for the festival itself. This included musical
work by composer Robert Langenfeld, who was scor-
Promo images for three short flms
The Worlds Most Interesting
Man meme
Matt Rouch and Courtney Hopkins in the
Hangar projection room
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ing the African documentary Children of Immy Yethu for director Courtney Hopkins. The
photo set of The Looking Glass was also reshared, which showed more interest than it was
originally shared.
Among the most popular of the behind-the-scenes shots was an image featuring the
festivals projectionist, then-professor Matt Rouch and director Courtney Hopkins, in the pro-
jector room of the Hangar. The image gained much attention, primarily towards Rouch.
FI NAL PROMO PHASE
Within the few days leading up to the event, the Facebook page for the Main Street
Film Fest was well-saturated with promo images, with a number of people talking about the
event online and through word-of-mouth. With the interest beginning to accumulate to a
high point, I used two fnal tools to help promote the event: press releases and promotional
videos.
Using advice from a friend working in University Relations at Northwest Missouri State,
I contacted an individual within the department to prepare a press release for the universi-
ty. After flling out some information about the event, a news release was published on the
homepage of Northwest Missouri State. This served to garner more attention for the event,
but I do not have fgures as to the number of people who viewed the link.
The last two promo pieces that I personally created were trailers for the event, though
the term sizzle reel is perhaps more applicable. The frst of these reels was set to the tune
Main St. Film Fest news release on the Northwest website
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of the Harlem Shake. The Harlem Shake tune was, for a brief moment, immensely popular
across YouTube; I utilized the song near the waning phase of its popularity to create the trail-
er.
For the fnal trailer, I strove to use a heavier rock-based tune to entice interest. For that,
I used The White Stripes Astro. Using Adobe Premiere, I shortened the song down to 38
seconds, cutting out nearly all vocals, leaving a near exclusive instrumental track. From there,
I culled all of the flms for the festival, grabbing snippets of each and stringing them together
to match the solid beat of the song. Between the Astro promo and the Harlem Shake pro-
mo, there have been a total of 346 views on YouTube.
THE FESTI VAL AND BEYOND
The 2013 Main Street Film Fest drew in a crowd of over 130, though an exact count
was not given of the number of attendees. With the theater seating approximately 220 per-
sons, nearly of the theater seats were occupied, indicating a number potentially as high as
145.
After the festival, the Missouri Film Commission, an ofcial government body under
the states Department of Economic Development, released their April 2013 newsletter, which
featured the Main Street Film Fest above the fold. The newsletter helped to give statewide
recognition of the flm festival in Maryville, Missouri.
Throughout the months of May and June, I began the process of uploading the
various short flms and music videos that were premiered at the Main Street Film Fest. These
productions were uploaded to the festivals ofcial YouTube channel. Each video received a
special thumbnail created for YouTube; many were culled from the previous promo image
series, but were altered to feature a consistent typeface across all thumbnails. To note, the
typeface featured in the thumbnails was 321 Impact, which was obtained through DaFont dot
com.
With the fall 2013 semester at Northwest beginning in August, I became president
of the Independent Filmmakers Club. I had previously been serving as Vice President of the
organization through the spring 2013 semester; I used my position to help fnd aid among
others, as well from the university, to fnancially support the event. After I began my term as
president, I began seeking out individuals who would be willing to take on the task of leading
the Independent Filmmakers Club in the coming spring 2014 semester, in the hopes of con-
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tinuing the Main Street Film Fest.
By December 2013, the new executive members of the flm club, including the roles
of President (henceforth known lead director) and promotions, were elected. It is my hope to
see these members undertake the tasks that I had laid forth in the previous year and use the
experience that I gained to better themselves for the 2014 Main Street Film Fest. By under-
standing the process of how I undertook the 2013 festival, they can better prepare for the flm
fest ahead in the spring.
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