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Category : publicity   |   Posted by : Ian   |   4 Comments

Sifting through all the images and data and audience reaction from the festival is a mammoth job in itself, and it can be hard to translate into anything digestible. Thanks to the joys of Wordle I’ve just fed all the comments from the 200 or so feedback cards we collected, and this is what came out the other end:

Feel the love! If you scrutinise carefully you can find the more critical stuff, particularly in relation to the coldness of the warehouse on the first night before we fixed the heating, but on the whole it’s all embarassingly positive.

Perhaps the biggest complaint (ie, about ten cards) was lack of local advertising/publicity. Talking to other festival folk this seems to be a familiar issue. In fact we got some really good local press/TV coverage, scattered the brochures everywhere and the installation trail was great for raising awareness, but making a real visual impact on a limited marketing budget in a big sprawling place like Birmingham is hard work. Anyway, this will be a priority for next year.

By the way, belated congratulations to the five winners of our comment-card competition… Peter and Julie Stainton (Southwater, West Sussex), Charlotte Eastop (London), Jasmine Hayward (Perry Barr), Sarah Coulston (Gainsborough) and Michael Fitzgerald (Earlsdon) have all won themselves an annual subscription to Electric Sheep.

Category : aftermath, publicity   |   Posted by : Ian   |   1 Comment

Peachy-pink clouds over Birmingham herald day 1 of the Flatpack Festival.

And the premiere of Dave Gaskarth’s lovely festival trailer.

Flatpack Festival 09 trailer from Dave Gaskarth on Vimeo.

(You may be sick of the sight of this by the end of the weekend.)

In other news…

-> there were a few issues with the booking system this week, so we’ve extended the closing date for booking Flatpack passes to the end of today. You can also pick them up from Floodgate Kino until Friday.

–> we’ve also noticed a few errors on the calendar page of the brochure. Many of the event/screening durations listed for Sunday 15th are a bit screwy (eg, Touki Bouki is not three hours long) so keep this in mind when you’re planning your day. We’ll post the right durations here shortly.

—> local people who can’t make it to Curzonora tonight can see some of the Birmingham Mitchell and Kenyon films on Midlands Today tonight. And don’t forget Vanessa Toulmin’s talk tomorrow…

Category : programme, publicity, ticketing & venues   |   Posted by : Ian   |   No Comments

A few people have been writing about the festival…

> BBC online on the Travelling Picture Show

> The Bioscope on Curzonora

> Evil Monito on the Outside Art strand

> and here’s a slightly incoherent piece I wrote for the Birmingham Post.

Category : publicity   |   Posted by : Ian   |   No Comments

Sometimes print publicity seems a bit pointless; all those piles of flyers when you can do the same job online with none of the expense or wasted paper. Yesterday in the Flatpack office though, the printed page was god. 20 boxes of brochures came trundling through the door, the first instalment in a hefty shipment which we’ll be scattering across Birmingham and beyond over the next couple of weeks. Much as we love embedded video-clips and drop-down menus and the endless scope for cross-referencing you get with the web, there’s still nothing like flicking through a film festival booklet and scribbling little asterisks next to the stuff you want to see. (Ok, so I’m a train-spotter.) Putting the thing together is almost as much of a mission as putting on the festival itself, especially when your designer lives and breathes every spread like ours does, but the result is an artefact which you can pull out years after the festival itself has been forgotten and the website has disappeared into digital oblivion.

Well that’s quite enough rhapsodisin’ over our PR. If you want to pick up one of these beauties they will be appearing in all sorts of places around Birmingham over the next week, in particular festival venues and shops on our installation trail [map]. And if you think your town might be interested in Flatpack let us know and we might send you a bundle.

Category : publicity   |   Posted by : Ian   |   2 Comments