Tuesday. Eleven days until Opening Night of the 2012 Art of Brooklyn Film Festival on August 4th.
This morning I am doing a lot of following up. I checked in with Sarah Kaufman, a key member of our Festival Committee, and updated her on yesterday’s efforts to encourage pre-sales. Jason, our Festival Director updated me on his early meeting with St. Francis College, whose Founders Hall and Maroney Theaters are hosting our Festival. St. Francis is in the midst of a renovation to their facade so we’ll have scaffolding to deal with. In and of itself, the scaffolding doesn’t bother us—our Brooklyn audiences won’t be thrown by it. But there has been a lot of negotiation about how and where we can place our posters and banners outside the venue because we can’t use the scaffolding as a backdrop for our signage. As of this morning we have come to an agreement about our outside signage, but we may need to remove it every night and replace it before the following evening. Not an ideal solution, but one I can live with. SpeedPro Imaging are donating two banners to the Festival, but they’ll need to be designed—a project that has been on hold until we could get confirmation about where we can place them. Anthony, our Director of Communications, will design them and we have an afternoon meeting to discuss their content.
Anthony argues that the branding we settled on for this year—based on elements derived from the winning design for our 2012 poster created by Portuguese illustrator Tiago Moura— should be carried over on at least one of the banners. It’s a strategic decision because that will mean we can’t re-use it in coming years, but I defer to his expertise. He is right. Carrying over the design, which appears on our posters, postcards, website, and cinema slides, onto one of the larger banners, will make the space look more cohesive. We’ll also need a vertical banner with our logo in a step-down pattern to act as a backdrop for photos, video interviews and press. Anthony did a cost-comparison but we decided that we should get a quote from SpeedPro and, if possible, buy from them because they have been so generous.
The films themselves have been programmed for several months so in this last two weeks we are focusing on the many production details of the event. Alfred Acceturra, our Program Manager, is working with St. Francis to have a temporary Ethernet cable run in the space so we won’t have to depend on their sometimes-shaky WiFi signal. Internet access will make it possible to take credit cards at the door. We will be displaying the poster contest finalists in the Callahan Gallery, outside Founders Hall Theater, so we’ll need to get those printed, mounted and hung in the coming days.
Thursday night (July 26) The Art of Brooklyn is hosting a FREE showing of the cult-classic The Warriors at Founders Theatre (180 Remsen St. Brooklyn, NY 11201) at 7pm. We’ll enter the space early to set up, take measurements and finalize our space plan.
Questions? Share your thoughts!