Week 4

We started this week off with a fantastic masterclass from publicist Clea Tammes. My 5 main takeaways from this talk were:

Volunteering at the Edinburgh International Film Festival was extremely useful for her in gaining experience and making contacts within the industry.
It’s important to think about all different user interfaces when creating content, making sure it’ll fit/ can be adapted to posters, trailers, instagram posts etc.
You can never get a publicist on too early in the process
Don’t blow all of your content at once. Wait until the point at which your audience is able to engage with the content. Most of your content should be coming out in the leadup to the release and shortly after the release of your film.
The P&A (Prints & Advertising) budget is usually 4 times the budget for the film as a whole, so never underestimate the importance of it.

This week was a slightly busier week, mostly for ‘Hypervigilant’ and ‘Us Not Them’, posting on the social media pages in preparation for shooting. We also had a seminar where we went through a script in our different departments and analysed the sections important to our group. I was in the production team and so we picked out areas where we would need risk assessments, or where we might need to figure out the logistics of a certain piece of set, or action.

For ‘Waiting for Marcus’, it has been a slightly quieter week as we’ve completed the casting call and are moving on to prepping for the shoot. Sára requested that I send her the meeting notes from our social media meeting the previous week and I did so over WhatsApp. I heard back from Sára about my audition and learnt that I unfortunately did not get the role, as she felt my chemistry was better with the Charlotte they decided not to go with.

For ‘Hypervigilant’ I had a meeting with director, Roisin, on Tuesday to discuss the social media strategy and to set up the Facebook page in order to distribute the casting call. We discussed the sorts of posts that we could post over the next few weeks, such as introductions to the director and DOP, cast announcements, and location photos, and Roisin gave me access to the Milanote page which has lots of the information and content for the film. She asked me to follow a number of people, as well as follow horror and film festival pages from the ‘Hypervigilant’ instagram, which I did shortly after the meeting ended, gaining us around 83 followers so far. She also requested that I post the casting call that day both on the Instagram and the Facebook pages. I added a caption which I felt captured people’s attentions and made the film seem exciting to work on, added some hashtags to get better traction, and posted it on the instagram feed & story, and on multiple different facebook groups for uk/scottish actors/ filmmakers. I have attached a photo of the post below. She also gave me the link to the Indiegogo fundraising page that she had created, along with a few inspiration images, and asked me to post that on the instagram. I suggested that we should wait a couple of days and post the funding post on Thursday, as leaving time between posts on instagram helps boost their traction within the algorithm and she agreed so I posted one of the inspiration images, along with an exciting caption, on Thursday afternoon, which I have attached below. I posted both instagram posts in the afternoon, around 4pm, as this is when they are most likely to be seen. I also messaged Roisin asking whether I would be able to audition for one of the roles in ‘Hypervigilant’ on Friday and am waiting to hear back about that.

For ‘Us Not Them’ I got a phone call from Hana and Maddie, the producer and 1st AD, asking me to post a casting call to the instagram. They had already created a post however asked me to come up with a caption and post it. I drafted a caption that evening and sent it back to Hana to check it was alright. She made a small change to the wording and sent it back to me to post the next day, which I did, adding a few hashtags and reposting it to the instagram story. I have attached the caption for this below. Whilst we were on the call there was also an issue with the password for the instagram account, however we managed to resolve the issue swiftly. I also followed quite a few other accounts, mostly either fellow students, or accounts related to film in order to boost the support for the film.