What if we had a night to enjoy each other’s favorite short films?
Note: this page is meant to be a playbook for future reference for myself and others, feel free to host your own!
A mini film festival
Over the years I’ve found many heartwarming or seat-clenching short films, and the impressions they have left on me have punched above their weight class. I have wondered, what are those films for my friends?
Please find and submit one short film/video between 1 and 15 minutes long. Submit a link to a film you found on this google form
Critiquing and Scoring
We will form critique groups to discuss, score, and enjoy the films as they are shown. Groups will judge categories such as Best Story, Best Acting, Best Cinematography, etc. At the end of the festival, each group will submit their reviews to a form for final scoring. Participants who submitted the winner of each category will win a small prize.
Last Festival’s Winners
In this sheet, you can find the full submission list as well as the winners in each category. Feel free to take inspiration for your own submissions, but bring what speaks to your heart!
Schedule
Send this out in a partiful text blast the day before or the morning of.
Hey all! Schedule for tonight:
- 6:00 Dinner and Wine
- 7:30 Block 1
- 8:15 Intermission
- 8:30 Block 2
- 9:15 Intermission
- 9:30 Block 3 - Short
- 10:00 Deliberations and Dessert
- 10:30 Award Ceremony
Excited to see yall tonight! Please submit your videos to the form (link in Partiful) if you haven’t yet! Excited to watch all the cute/action/drama/whatev short films!
Reflection on Schedule
The first time I hosted this I actually only had 1 intermission, and it was like 10 minutes long. Which is barely enough time to get drinks, and speak to more attendees. So in this playbook, I’m suggesting 2 intermissions and made them longer.
Attendees also asked to start earlier so that after it’s all done, there’s more time to talk to each other and oogle over the films. So in this playbook I’m opting to include an optional “come over early for dinner”!
The original schedule spanning 8:00 to 11:30 with 2 hours of film content, and it felt just a tad rushed. So don’t compress more than that IMO.
Operation
Setup
- To accommodate 17 people we brought out two couches, and covered the floor in two carpets
- We set up charcuterie board
- My roomies N and S were incredible in helping set up
- We setup two candles on the coffee table for more vibes
Showing the Films
- I had a laptop hooked up to TV over HDMI
- Good audio is important for the experience, so I ran 3.5mm to JBL Charge 4
- After playing a film, I would let the peanut gallery run for 5 to 20s, before inviting the submitter to give context and answer questions like:
- How did you find this film?
- What did you first feel when you saw it?
- What made you choose to submit this?
- The above “context” would be great material to spin off side conversations.
- As a host, if the room is quiet, don’t be afraid to go teacher mode and say “Ok, now discuss what you liked with your the peers sitting next to you!”
- The above discussion would be good time for me to set up and load the next film. I think ideally you want the discussions to run for about 1 to 2 mins.
Critique and Scoring
After the final showing, we went into deliberations. The purpose of doing this in groups is to force attendees to think about and vocalize what they liked and disliked about each film.
Announce to the group again the categories of prizes. And have them pick the top two for each category. It is useful to make sure film submissions have a short name available for people to use for voting.
Submitting scoring. This was a bit haphazard, but I just asked one representative of each group to text me.
Then I took inspiration from Science Olympiad, and showed one final encore film ~10 minutes for me to catalog and see who won.
If you’re smarter than me, you would set up some final google form that does ranked choice voting.
Idea for next time: in the final intermission, randomly generate (or not randomly) critique groups of 3 to 4. They will sit with this group for Block 3. This is a great opportunity to get people to meet new ones.
Retros
- I got a photo of all the category winners together, but I think it would have been cuter if it was winners + trophys + the rest of the crowd too
- People really liked the 3D printed awards!
- This took like 5 minutes to make in Fusion360. Give it a shot!
- One of my friends, A brought a polaroid camera and it was a godsend since I didn’t have to worry about taking photos.
- Photographer friends are goats.
- People showed up on time because I sent out a schedule.
- Food was far from the seating area, make sure to keep bringing food and snacks out to the watching area! That way people will eat it.
- Some people messed up the video prompt (but now I have a link to last year’s submissions so I think that will help)
More Ideas
- If you have too many attendees, make people pair up for submissions. Could be a neat date idea pseudo-setup.
- This could be a really cool opportunity to dress up! Next time I want to roll out a (cheap) red carpet, and ask people to dress nicely!