 Welcome to In The Studio. Today, I'm your host, Emily Merton, and I have two talented UC Davis students joining me to talk about the UC Davis Film Festival for 2016. Hi guys, thanks for joining me. Thank you very much. So to start out, why don't we just introduce ourselves? So do you want to introduce yourself and tell me your role in the making of the UC Davis Film Festival? OK, so my name is David. I am a third year UC Davis undergrad student. I think officially my title is Assistant Producer, but basically I manage the social media aspects of Film Festival, outreach, marketing, things like that. Great. That's important. That's how you get your audience, right? Yeah. All right. What about you? I'm Evan Lilly, and I'm an associate producer. I'm currently a senior, and I've been going to UC Davis for about three years now. I've taken on a variety of responsibilities. Most of them have been involving the production of some of our promotion material, as well as a trailer that we're currently creating. And I've also been assisting with the creation of a separate event in which we hope to promote the festival. Awesome. So what kind of films are featured in this? Is it students from UC Davis, or is it local films, or what? All of them are from UC Davis students. Awesome. So all of them within a certain department, or is it just anyone who wants to participate can? Oh, it's all UC Davis students. We do mostly get students that are directly involved with film, but it's actually opened up to pretty much everyone. We've actually seen students who work in agricultural studies, and they've actually managed to make some really great material. That's awesome. So it's pretty much open to anyone who wants to work with a camera. Great. So basically, you target, do you find the people, David, to provide you the films, or do you just try to bring people in to watch the films? So we do outreach during some of the club events where all the clubs on campus got together, and we try to make ourselves present. But we don't go up to individual people and say, hey, let's submit a film. But we do just mass marketing. And then whoever submits a film will just take it. So there's no restriction or anything like that. Great. How many submissions do you usually get? Do you get a lot, and do you have to narrow it down usually? And who chooses the films? I want to say about 50 films. And usually it's the faculty that goes in and watches all the films. And they will nominate the different categories and awards. There's also going to be an audience choice award and also a crew's favorite choice award. So yeah, mainly it's faculty just because we might know the people making the film, and we might become biased when making decisions. So we want to try to keep it as impartial as possible. That makes sense. When is this film festival? It's going to be in May 18th and 19th. Great of 2016. Yes. Awesome. There is a, the submission is actually in April 22nd. Because there needs to be a certain time when we can all select the films and also make sure that they'll be able to be seen on the theater correctly. Because there's a lot of different technical aspects that go in from making a small digital film that one might see on a computer to something that someone would actually project onto a major theater screen. And it's a very different experience for the students. Where is the film festival held this year or next year? Traditionally it's at the Davis Varsity Theater in the downtown region. How do you get the varsity theater? Do you have to fundraise for it? To, do you have to, what do you do? Yeah, we do a lot of fundraising. But mainly the tickets pay for themselves. So we do rent a venue. And then the ticket sales, a big portion of it goes to the rental of the area. Great. How much are tickets? For now, I want to say that the first night is $7. And then if you want to buy both nights, Thursday and Friday, that's $10. Great. So it's a better deal to go to both. And I think once you go to one, you'll probably want to go to both, right? Definitely. So you can vote on your favorite and stuff. Sounds like a fun experience. Do you guys get to watch the films before the film festival? I think our head producer gets to watch it. And I think after the faculty decides which films are actually going to be screened, then we all watch it. But before that, we don't watch every single submission. The faculty does that. All right, so yeah, that's great. So what do you guys do to kind of get it all put together? How many people are involved in the making of this film festival? Well, initially it actually starts somewhat small. We only started off with the head producer, several, a few associates, including me and another talented student named Crystal Chen. We've also worked with our technical director, Bobby Black. And we've also worked with a few associates and many faculty members. And we're also trying to collaborate with several different clubs as well. Awesome. How long have you guys each been involved in this? Is this your first year helping put it together? I think we're pretty much involved right after the last year's festival. Oh, how many festivals is it annual? How many have you had? The 16th, well, one we're going to be hosting in 2016 will be the 16th festival. Wow. So is there a certain theme of types of films that you show, or is it any film? Well, any film, actually. Anything, yeah. There's a really big variety. Some have been traditional action movies. And there's been documentaries about real personal things and also major events, such as one documentary was actually about the use of unmanned drones in the US military. And then there were also a few animation versions as well, such as things that were done by paper and one even managed to win an award for making a Lego film. Wow. That's very cool. So for the categories of winners or whatever, do you put the Lego film up against the documentary and stuff and have people vote against those too? Or do you separate the categories as in documentary and action film? Well, there are separate categories. They tend to change over the years. I don't know exactly about a Lego. The Lego is usually in a different category because not just Lego, it's also like the claymation, the paper animation, and a lot of digital animation as well. They tend to be in the category of animation, but it would be possible to blend those two if someone made a documentary animation. Yeah, that makes sense. But that's merely a speculation for now. We couldn't exactly say that before someone turns in the Lego documentary. A documentary on how to make a claymation. Absolutely. So what have you done to fundraise so far? For this year, we actually have a fundraiser coming up on Monday at Tebow in South Davis. And that's actually going to be our first fundraiser for the year. So far, we've been working on a film screening and other trailer promotions, so we haven't gone around to fundraiser quite that much yet. But we're hoping that once the new year begins, we'll be ramping it up a lot more. And then mainly it's going to be restaurant fundraisers and just local Davis, whoever wants to support us. That's great. So what social media outlets do you use to promote the film festival? We have Facebook, which is sort of a primary way to give updates to our fans, I guess. And then Instagram, we do sort of take pictures and videos of the events live, if we can. And then there's also our website, filmfestucd.com. That's more of the official announcements or submission page for people who want to get more involved. And then Vimeo and YouTube tends to be the platform where we use to upload the winners after the film festival is completed. And great, is it public that film's after? Everyone can watch it online. That's great. What's your Instagram name for people who want to see more and your Facebook page? Instagram is at filmfestucdavis. Then Facebook is facebook.com slash filmfestucd. Do you think that social media has a big role in getting people to come to the film festival? Yeah, definitely, because you can invite your friends to come, but that's one of the very big features of having an event on Facebook and then express very quickly, just because everyone would invite all the friends and classmates to come. And also because we can show all the photos and maybe some teaser videos online and that gets the excitement going. Great, that's definitely how I find out about things, basically entirely social media nowadays. So what's your favorite aspect of being an associate producer? Well, I don't know exactly what to say or what my favorite part has been. But I do feel like there was a really great feeling about trying to continue this tradition because some students have had wonderful times at the festival each year. And I wanted to try to actually make that again possible. Because I myself hadn't been part of the festival for many years. I attended and didn't send anything in. And I only signed something in last year, actually, I was involved in three productions. And after that I decided to sign up for the next one and we're trying to make it, well, better than ever. What have you learned about being an associate producer for so many years? What will you do differently this year than you didn't do last year? Well, trying to write down some of those lessons. Yeah, keeping organized, that's important. Yeah, so what about you? Have you been participating for multiple years? Yeah, I started out last year and this will be my second year as assistant producer. For me, the biggest thing is, because I'm an economics and stats major, not so much in the arts and performing arts area. So being in a film festival really exposes me to something totally different from my major. And I really like the exposure to this arts in general and that's when we meet different people, very talented directors, producers and actors. As for me, it's just a very rewarding process. Yeah, that makes sense. Do you think there's anything that your major does help you with in regard to promoting? I guess a little bit in terms of communication and I also do a little bit of the treasury. So just organizing the money or getting statistics from our events, that's sort of intersecting with my major. Yeah, that makes sense. It seems like there's a need for all different kinds of people in this and it brings people together to watch films. So do you see mostly UC Davis students in coming to the film festival? Are there children, adults, who comes? What's your audience? Well, typically it is mostly students. We also get plenty of the faculty of students, families and several members of the local community as well. Yeah, I think I'll definitely go. I had no idea about the film festival before but as a high school student, I think I'll definitely go and tell my friends about it because it sounds like an awesome experience. Are you guys really excited about this? Well, absolutely. How's it coming along? Well, so far we're still working on promotion material and we're also trying to work with plenty of other different groups. And in fact, this year we're trying something new where we're trying to create a separate event to encourage participation in the film festival. We're trying to get all the other universities or the other UC campuses to submit some of their own works and show some examples of the work they've done. That's so great. So possibly in the future, UC Davis could host a myriad of schools and creating a giant film festival from all the UCs. I think that would be awesome. Well, yeah, we have thought about that but we sort of want to keep it small for now. Yeah, for now. Yeah, so it's mainly just to try to encourage some of the students here. But we will get to see a lot of talent from around the whole state or at least those few college campuses. That's great, awesome. I'm so glad that I've learned about this new found discovery of film festivals. I didn't know UC Davis even had one. Davis doesn't seem very much like a hotspot for that but now that we know about it, I will definitely attend. Thank you so much for joining me. If you want to know more about the UC Davis Film Festival, you could visit their Facebook page like was mentioned earlier or their Instagram or their website. What was that website again? Filmfestucd.com. All right, awesome. Thank you so much for joining me, David and Evan. If you want to check out more of our videos online, you can go to dctv.davismedia.org or you could check us out on YouTube at Davis Media Access. Thank you so much. I was your host, Emily Merton and I'll see you next time.