At the end of the Opening Night Launch Party for the One Earth Film Festival on March 6, remaining volunteers and filmmakers gathered for a group photo. Within a week, gatherings such as these would no longer be possible.
By Cassandra West
It’s March 6, opening night for the ninth One Earth Film Festival. Inside the Gold Coast Tesla showroom, the mood is festive. Champagne flows at a corner station. Guests throughout the car-filled space take group photos with their smartphones. Others wait in line for a Tesla test drive. The cheery sounds of party chatter fill the air.
OEFF director Ana Garcia Doyle addresses guests on opening night, March 6.
But on this evening, when reports of a contagious virus had become a major news story, everyone is being careful about hand shaking and standing a little too close to other guests. This is a night for celebrating, as more than 40 screening programs over the next 10 days lay ahead.
A decisive moment
The festival officially kicks off the next day and everything goes as planned. Attendance is strong, and the planning team sees months of hard work coming to fruition. But by the middle of the next week, news of the coronavirus changes the landscape. The virus has become a serious threat, not just to the Chicago area, but to the entire United States and the world. One Earth’s leadership, which has been following the COVID-19 outbreak in Illinois, wisely concludes that the festival could not continue with live events.
“The responsible decision is to postpone or shift the remaining festival events to a virtual gathering in order to flatten the curve,” festival director Ana Garcia Doyle wrote in an email sent March 12 to all registered attendees.
“We decided to make three of the remaining 18 festival events virtual in a matter of hours, after the Covid-19 pandemic declaration,” Doyle says. On Thursday, March 12, all venues and partners were given the option of postponing or going virtual because “we decided nothing would be cancelled.”
Pivoting at lightning speed, festival organizers worked with hosting venues to postpone 15 events and release associated messaging, while transitioning a handful of events from live to virtual in about a 4-hour timespan, according to Doyle.
With the backing of the festival’s board, Doyle turned her attention to taking the festival online.
Rising to the challenge
“Ana is undaunted by even the steepest challenge,” board member Jodi Wine says. “When the board decided on March 12 that it would have to cancel the rest of the festival, Ana jumped into action and contacted all remaining venues to ask if they would prefer to shift to a virtual screening or postpone their event, and even pulled off two virtual screenings that evening!”
From there, Doyle and a small team pulled together the technology, confirmed licenses from the filmmakers for digital delivery, coordinated facilitators and panelists, adjusted the program script, created slides and notified attendees over the course of an afternoon. “Ana’s unflinching focus on the end goal is unparalleled. Most people wouldn’t even attempt it; she pulled it off,” Wine says.
But that wasn’t the end. Another full week of festival programs had been planned around Earth Day in late April, which OEFF does every year in partnership with the City of Chicago.
Filmmaker John Chester talks from his home in California via Zoom after the screening of “The Biggest Little Farm.”
“It was certainly anxiety-producing, but we had three virtual screenings under our belt in mid-March with less lead time, preparation, and knowledge of Zoom [the popular videoconferencing platform] — and we had an incredible team,” Doyle says about making the Earth Day Mini Film Festival totally virtual.
Taking the mini festival online took about three weeks to identify additional films, negotiate licenses for digital delivery and develop programs for the eventual seven virtual screenings. “Why We Cycle” and “When the Earth Moves,” not originally planned for the mini fest, were the two add-ons.
Doyle says she reached out to some of the festival’s longest-standing, experienced facilitators, “who all luckily continue to believe in our work and said yes with short notice.”
Sue Crothers, Founding Director of the Young Filmmakers Contest, facilitated a Q&A with Honorable Mention contest winners, as well as three smaller online events featuring the youngest contest winners from grades 3 to 5. Kohl Children's Museum in Glenview had suggested these virtual collaborations for children in honor of Earth Day.
Tackling the technical
To ensure that everyone had a positive virtual screening experience, getting the technology right was paramount. That’s where a talented tech team came in. Doyle called on Garen Hudson, the festival technical lead for the past two years, and Jen Nelson, a talented strategist and OEFF’s all-around problem solver, to be the cornerstone team members in planning how the underpinnings of a virtual mini fest would work.
Doyle explains: “We started this discussion in mid-March, immediately after completing our first three virtual screenings, and we analyzed the performance of those screenings and what we would work to improve for April.” Two to three weeks before the mini fest, OEFF recruited “a crack group of four additional incredible tech folks to serve as a troubleshooting team for mini fest screenings all week long.
Then Doyle and the team drew up a schedule of which tech folks would work particular screenings, and a document that captured best practices, agreed-upon protocols. They added to this document to keep fine-tuning as the fest progressed and they learned more about how to better manage and minimize tech issues.
“The awesome group included Erin Turney, OEFF tech lead veteran and her business partner Sam Huff, both of Bearfish Productions, who assisted from the West Coast; Dave Hudson (Garen’s dad); and a long-term festival volunteer David Holmquist, who had a good bit of Zoom experience already.”
Garen Hudson described how his team pulled together the virtual screenings. “Figuring out how to set everything up through Zoom with the volume of participants we had, how to provide assistance to folks that needed it mid-screening, and what processes to use to assure optimal quality took a lot of brain-power and planning. More than the specific tech pieces, working to find ways to continue our community oriented, action-focused model was interesting, to say the least. The whole fest could have been very simple if we just sent out links to the films and left it at that. But at that point would it really have been a festival?”
Two days before the fest, the tech team met to get connected, coordinated, and to check signals and be ready. “Not to jinx anything for the future, but tech issues were not even close to what I thought they would be with hundreds of folks hitting both Zoom and Vimeo at each of our events throughout the week,” Doyle muses in retrospect.
It wasn’t just tech issues that needed to be ironed out. Just as important was getting out word about a festival that was no longer going to be held in physical venues.
Lisa Files, OEFF’s webmaster and digital team lead, set up the Virtual Mini Film Fest page on the website, ticket sales in Eventbrite, and the eNews in Mailchimp. Shelby Best, marketing lead, cast a wide net using the festival’s social media channels to reach a wider audience via outreach to sustainability partners, who helped amplify the mini festival’s offerings. “It was impressive to see how wide we could cast our net when we dropped the physical limitations of a normal film festival,” Best says.
Ana Garcia Doyle, left, filmmakers and subject experts in a post-screening Zoom discussion.
A reach around the globe
Nearly 2,000 mini film festival viewers tuned in from as far away as Scotland, New Zealand and Antarctica, while filmmaker-speakers Zoomed in from across the Chicago region, as well as California, Colorado, Hawaii, Washington, DC, New York and The Netherlands.
Asked whether she gained any insights from the virtual mini fest experience, Doyle says:
“It seems clear to me that humans are social creatures, in need of community however they can find, get, and build it. This is very encouraging. Even in this acutely strange and uncomfortable time of a global pandemic and social distancing, people are still craving ways to connect with others in community, especially around topics about which they are deeply, intensely committed, or are wanting to learn more about.”
Go here to view some recordings of virtual screening events from OEFF’s 9th annual March festival, as well as its 6th annual mini festival partnership with the City of Chicago.