Last night saw us down at the Apollo Cinema for the opening night gala of the Raindance Film Festival.
London Calling has been working regularly with the Festival, distributing their print and poster publicity, but this is our first year supporting the event as an official media partner and we’re thrilled to be involved.
Speaking of print publicity, the full Festival catalogue can be downloaded from their site here. Counting in at a whopping 160+ printed pages it’s a little bit big for one of our display racks – I’d estimate we could fit maybe three of these in any one display point – and they’ve even divided up the digital version into four discreet sections to make it more manageable.
We’ve solved this by distributing both a single A5 leaflet and a smaller “minilogue” highlighting specially selected events and the film cafe alongside a fold-out programme listing and screening pass promotion. It’s the perfect fit for us, and a cost-effective way of raising early awareness and directing traffic to their information-rich website.
Being partners with Raindance is not only a great opportunity to support the best in independent film and see some great new movies, it’s also the ideal opportunity for us to gain a greater understanding of new ways to engage with different audiences and the unique demands this can create when planning a campaign.
Festivals move quickly and then they’re gone for a year, so one of the biggest challenges was to be sure we were targeting a broad spread of potential new audiences and announcing the festival London-wide. The combination of different pieces of print meant we were able to generate advance awareness even while the festival programme was still being finalised with an initial burst of high visibility flyers.
Meanwhile the decision to use of the smaller minilogue rather than attempt to work with a full-sized brochure on display meant that we were not only able to follow up with more detailed information as the opening night approached, but we were also able to help the Raindance team keep a better control on their overall printing budgets. This put enough aside to make the full catalogue not only a great piece of print but a great piece of festival memorabilia in its own right.
Raindance 2009 runs until Sunday 11th October and will screen over 14,000 minutes of independent short films, features and documentaries across 12 days.
The Guardian recommends it, and so do we.