As we approach the end of our first week, it’s interesting to reflect on how things are going with the festival. As you know, our second festival’s format is an experiment. Rather than a standard long-weekend or 10-day film festival format, we’re running EcoFocus for a month. Each Friday, we open 2-3 new films and run them for a week. The short films are shown throughout the month in blocks. Why the new format? Lots of reasons, the first of which being we’re relatively new and it makes sense to try a few different ways of doing this. Another major reason for this experiment is that we live in a town with lots to do. Too much to do, in fact. For a town of its size, the number of leisure activities available to Athenians is overwhelming. We decided to give people more chances to see these films. In part this was a response to the (reasonable) excuse of “I was out of town that weekend and missed the whole fest.” We also hope that this format gives the films themselves the opportunity to generate buzz and draw in more viewers.
As much as I hesitate to admit this publicly, the EcoFocus films are pretty intense. Thus another reason for this new format is to be a little more realistic about how many films like these people are willing to take in over a short period of time. By offering each film several times over a week-long period, audiences can spread their film viewing out over the month, which is realistic not only in terms of people’s time, but also in terms of spreading out the intensity in a way that’s more conducive to really digesting the information.
How’s it going so far?
The short answer is: It’s too early to tell. We’ll see. We had a tough opening weekend due to competition with a home football game in Athens. For any of you reading this outside of Athens (or outside of the Southeast, for that matter), you might not have an appreciation for what that really means. But we knew about the game going into it, and were prepared for that. The long answer is: We suspect it’s going well. People tend to take a little while before they start paying attention to things happening around them. We hope that, at some point, the TV ads, billboards, posters, postcards, programs, and radio shows will start to sink in, and luckily, we still have three weeks to go! We also think that the several free events we’re sponsoring will draw some people in to the festival.
Last night, we had 175 people show up to a free screening of No Impact Man at the Tate Center Theater on the UGA campus. I think it’s safe to say that the awesome attendance last night is an indication of things picking up for EcoFocus.
Keep checking back, and we’ll let you know what we think! We’ve got a big weekend coming up with opening of The Cove, End of the Line, and Tapped. These films and related events should be a big draw, and we’re grateful to not be competing with football this time around. Thanks for reading!
