00:00
[MUSIC] Welcome to the UP TechTalk Podcast coming to you from Academic Multimedia Studio on the University of Portland campus. Produced by Academic Technology Services. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] Welcome to the UP tech talk podcast. Today we're going to talk about the upcoming third annual Kate Regan short film festival which is happening on March 29th.

31st. 31st, March 31st, so that's a week from Thursday. Right. And this is a new tradition that we have at UP, and it's an international film festival where any faculty or students are able to create short films and enter them, to be shown in a public Film festival style and then screening.

And they're competing for both glory and cash money, cash prizes, right Maria? Mostly glory this year, [LAUGH] but yes, there are some cash prizes involved. Yes, this is a really fun thing that really, I think, does a nice job of bringing some of the community together and showcasing some of the people's different artistic skills

But today we wanted to do a little bit of a dive or a deep dive into some of the tech that it takes to run something like this. Because that eventhough it is sort of an artsy kind of undertaking to put on a film festival. There's just so much technology that happens on the back end.

And we wanted to talk a little bit about that today. So Maria can you start by telling me a little bit about the humble origins of the technology behind the film festival. Because as I understand it it was a little bit more low tech the first year. Yeah, it was so low tech it was no tech the first year.

[LAUGH] We had a poster, so that happened. [LAUGH] It was a really good poster, but it musically. [CROSSTALK] Who designed the poster? Well that was our beloved reindeer we had with us at the time. [LAUGH] [LAUGH] And is now off on other ventures, but Yo, a student working for us designed the poster and it was a really a beautiful poster

We put it up all around campus. That was really the only advertisement we had for the film festival. And as I mentioned, fortunately we had Dr. Vail Fletcher's many, many communication students attending. For the five films that were in the festival that year. There was no length limit, there were very few, if any, rules, or any stipulations around it.

It was just get it off the ground that first year, which of course the late great Kate Regan did, just to get it established. And then last year we were really focused on, okay, now that we have this thing that's a part of our community, how can we really build this into a real film festival?

And that's what we focused on last year, so That's when we brought on board the MediaSpace channels for submissions. I know we're gonna talk about this a little bit more. But the website became a thing. We had more communications to the community via postcards and fliers and a lot of promo leading up to the event.

And that was just last year. And this year we tried to build on that even more. Got you, so the first year it was really just asking people to put their videos up on YouTube and then we provided a poster for advertisement and a venue to screen. And I think there was some sort of food involved [LAUGH].

Well, that never hurts. Of course, that never hurts. I think it was, again, pretty low On the scale there. So really then the second year you amped it up quite a bit. So we had an entire web site dedicated to the film festival that provided all sorts of information and allowed people to register, and even to have instructions and sort of a process for submitting it.

So really became a lot more of an organized kind of entity, the second year, it sounds like. Yes, we formalized the process in every way really. It sounds like WordPress was a very instrumental technology in allowing you to kinda take the film festival itself to the next level. Do you wanna talk about that a little bit?

Totally, we rely on. Course as you know WordPress here for many things but, in the case of the film festival WordPress is our website. We use the subscription feature so that we can ask people to subscribe to the website they get all the latest web posting and can keep up to date on information.

We also use a plugin called Event Espresso which allows us to have people register for the event and we can communicate with all of our registrants that way, we also know who has registered, the title of their film, the category they're registering in that kind of thing. Yeah. We had this year, we also added an Instagram plugin so now we can promo the films that way with some really nice visuals, which actually April McCarran has been making for us this year.

[LAUGH] Excellent. Very nicely. So, yeah, WordPress does a lot for us. Yeah. Something that strikes me about WordPress, when I worked with it with different people in the community, was just how incredibly versatile and how powerful a platform, it is for web publishing. You know can have everything from a website for a filmfestival to like a small team site that does notifications and message board for a small team which I helped set up the other day for the library to like a landing page for that's essentially an advertisement and a class project for MBA students.

So it's a really, really incredibly powerful web publishing platform and the one thing you had mentioned was a couple of plug-ins Mm- hm. which are available to. Kind of extend the functionality of WordPress into different areas. So, some other really cool ones are the subscribe to plug-in, which, as you had mentioned lets people subscribe to your website or your blogs that they can keep up to date with the things that you're posting, and the Event Espresso plug-in which is a really, really powerful Tool to allow people to register for your events.

We can make sure that we know who's registering for the film festival, we can collect any information that we need to ahead of time, and kind of funnel them into the proper areas for their submission and things like that. So, definitely an awesome tool for people to keep in mind if they need to have any kind of web presence.

Right and these things really scale which is great about it. I mean just managing these say 30 participants we have this year. You know as we build this festival out in the future we can expect maybe to double the number of participants next year. Trying to manage a mailing list of even 60 people or just mailing communications to all those people would be so difficult.

Without all that the plugin does for us. So it's really important to have those things in place. Cool. I think that's kind of a neat kind of look behind part of the process. And I know the other thing is just all this video content, right? How do we manage that?

How do we take in submissions, how do we categorize them? How do we get them in front of the judges' eyes but not the general public's eyes? And then how do we actually screen them, right? So? Yeah. And of course, all of that, we use media space for, and of course, we do take a lot of flack from time to time from people about why can't we use just YouTube cuz that's what we're use to using, and that's what everybody uses and it's easy to be sympathetic at the beginning.

But of course when on our end of things, when we have to do what we have to do, which is maintain privacy a lot of times, or at least access to the content, and also to be able to call these things up when we need to find them. [LAUGH]

[LAUGH] And we also can't rely on having this content out in third-party channels where anything can happen to it. I mean, you just have no idea whether it will be there one day or the next half the time. So we have to have a measure of control over it, and that's what MediaSpace allows us to do.

So in this case we set up a channel for the participants to be able to upload their videos to and once the submissions were received on that channel then I could screen them over and make sure that they had clipped them out if I had needed to. Any or they had any identifying markers in them such as, you know, a lot of times, the director will accidentally put their name on it.

[LAUGH] Accidentally on purpose. [LAUGH] Or just forget, or just maybe not read the fine print in all of our submission guidelines. So I'll have to clip those things out so that the judges, we can maintain our truly blind judging policy. There are no identifying marks in the film so when the judges see them, they don't know who made them, there's nothing that ever goes to the judges that indicates one way or another who was behind the film.

And now do you just put that out in MediaSpace? I do I do everything from the front end of MediaSpace, which is a really nice interface to work with. So again it allows us to get the functionality that we need. On the judges end of things, once the all the submissions have been received and appropriately clipped if needed.

The judges have access to this channel that no one else does, which is called the judges channel and then they get to go in there and view the submissions. And And they're just streaming them, correct? They don't need to worry about downloading That's right, they don't have to. Large files or anything.

download anything which is so great. They can view from any device, they can look at things on their phone or their iPad if they want to. I just find that that's such an easy process, trying to manage physical media, which is what people had to do in the past, right?

And even today, a lot of film festivals require you to drop off a DVD, and that's mailed out to to a judge. But in our case, everything is placed in MediaSpace so judges can access it anywhere, at any time, and on any days. Just to take sort of a tangent.

But I wonder how much the larger Hollywood world is going to move in that direction for film festivals and things like that. Because I know like, critics get advanced DVD screeners in the mail. Yeah. And I know like, my uncle used to have access to the Oscar screeners. Wow.

Cuz he was in like the acting guild or something. So he would just like send them to us. [LAUGH] Oh, Wow. And I know that there's been problems with like seasons of Game of Thrones like leaking early and things like that to the point where they're like not even sending these screeners out anymore so

I wonder if the larger sort of Hollywood world is gonna move into sort of a more streaming kind of world where they can lock things down a little bit better. And control access a little bit better and also kind of eliminate some of that distribution challenge that they have with the physical media.

Yeah it seems a likely scenario to me. Well, sorry for the tangent there. Oh No. So you were saying sort of your process of using the channels in media space. Right. To get the videos in front of the right eyes, right? Yeah. Yeah, and then the other piece of tech that we use, which I actually didn't have on my little tech list, is Google Docs.

And that's where all the judges score cards are. So once the submission channel had been completed, I could send out a link To the channel, to the judges. And then the other link that I sent them was to a file in Google docs with the score. There's a scorecard for each entry in the film festival.

Again, it's a totally blind process, so there is no. No way to identify which judge has which card. They fill them out independently. Nobody else sees them, except for me when I tally them. But there's no way for each judge to tell who did what, or who submitted what, or for anybody else to identify that either.

So, again, Google Docs allowed us to supply those 33, or whatever it was, cards. The judges fill them out online, again from anywhere- Yes, 33 times. Five judges, right? Well, there's three this year. There were five last year, but there's three this year. Yes, so it's like 100 scorecards, and the Best in Show scorecard, again the judges can do this Anywhere from any device, so Google Docs allows us to do that.

And again, without these kinds of things you'd be talking about mountains of paper. It's just a process that once you set it up, it really makes a lot of sense and it's easy to manage. And it scales. Exactly. I think the scalability is a great point as well. Huge.

Great, and I think it's one more shout out I would do is, you talked a little bit about in the first season you had a poster that was designed. And then I know last year and this year you're really ramping up some of the advertising and some of the marketing that you're doing for the film festival.

And I know you're taking advantage of a resource we have here which is our student run Design and Multimedia production studio on the bluff studios, correct? Absolutely. We absolutely rely on our on the bluff studio, team of talented members, for a lot of the promo materials that we have going into the festival.

In fact, right behind me, right now, our own April McCann, is designing the program brochure. That's right. For the film festival itself, and she's done a wonderful job. It looks beautiful. And we've got Brie Garcia has been doing a lot of the montages this year. She put them together last year.

Right, just editing video together. Yeah, mash-ups. And as you know heading into the event, your role. [LAUGH] As the master blaster behind the scenes. All the media heading into that, is a big deal there's a lot of that, we do need downloads of the films that will be screened in their entirety.

So those are the ones that win in every category and the best in the show. So we'll be showing them in their entirety. The 48 hour film-athon film. We've got some other surprises in addition to having montages from every category that's going to be in the awards ceremony. We've got a lot of media that needs to have it's sound quality upgrade up to par.

The visuals have to be really high quality. There's a lot of editing that goes into all of these things. Absolutely. Yeah, and I just wanted to give on the Bluff a little shout out because I know they do really great work. Not a lot of people know about them yet, because they are pretty new but they can be a really, kind of a life saver in putting together some of this media and, faculty can ask for their assistance in various multi-media and promotional type of projects.

Yeah, I think once they see the. The Greek graphics that we have going into the festival on screen and in print. Mm-hm. That's really better than words can. [LAUGH] [LAUGH] do for promo. Absolutely. [LAUGH] Okay Mary, well, I think we'll wrap up there. Thanks for giving us a little bit of an insight behind your process this year, and thanks for all the incredible and hard work that you've done putting this film festival on.

I had the opportunity to kinda help out with it a little bit last year, and I'm gonna do that again this year. And I'm just really excited to get to take part in such an awesome event on our campus. [INAUDIBLE] Thank you. Thank you for joining us for another episode of the UP Tech Talk podcast.

We post new episodes on Friday mornings. If you want to hear more please subscribe through iTunes or check out the Tech Talk Blog at techtalk.up.edu. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]