My friend CK is a independent film producer and so when I saw that the FilmDayton Festival was going on this past weekend and I was already going to be there, I knew that we had to attend at least one showing. I was really impressed! Quality of films — Sometimes I worry about the quality of the films that you’ll end up getting at a small film festival. Its not that I don’t appreciate the lower quality work, but sometimes that shaky camera gives me a bit of a headache. But the level of quality of these films was phenomenal. There were numerous award winning/nominated films here and one of the producers even came from Denmark to hold a question and answer period after the showing. Price — $ 5. Seriously. You can’t go to the movies for $ 5 anymore. At least not a good one. And these were good ones. And some of the workshops and panels were even free. Venue — The movies and events were held in 2 locations, right across the street from one another — The Neon and Gillie. The film that CK and I saw was shown at the Neon which was a nice, small theatre where my shoes didn’t stick to the floor and the seat was actually comfortable. Turn out — Not too good. I was expecting more people. I was expecting more enthusiasm. Instead people were largely apathetic. The audience was sparse. Kinda sad really. Planning — Could be better. I’ll give them some leeway because this is only their second year but still. Event planners, think out things please! I bought the tickets online before the event because I though they might be crowded(see above) and I wanted to make sure we had tickets in hand. After I bought them it says you must print them because they need the bar code. That’s easy enough. If you have a printer. Which I don’t. After some scrambling to get them printed(thanks CK) we headed down to the Neon where we walked in and noticed a line so we went over and stood in the line to get in. After getting to the theatre’s door we were told we had to go turn our tickets in. Went to another table where after all that printing to make sure there was a barcode, they just looked at it and gave us tickets. You know. One of those little red raffle tickets. Really? We had to do all that to get a raffle ticket? Which the lady at the door then promptly tore in half. Make it easier to come to your event and more people will come. Not hard really.
