On the brink of another Festival brochure

The week before Christmas but you'd hardly credit it here at... well, I can't say Borderlines Film Festival HQ because we all work from home or other offices. No cards sent, not a whiff of turkey,  a glint of tinsel, no holly wreath or plum pudding and the first and only mince pie of the season passed my lips on Friday night. The cheeriest thing around is the Festival flyer, so bright this year that you could almost warm your hands on it. It's doing the rounds but if you haven't seen it, here is the electronic version.

Open publication - Free publishing - More borderlines

The reason for the absence of festive spirit is that, as Marketing Manager, I'm teetering on the point when work on the 2013 Festival Brochure can go ahead. Some films come up with a chance of being picked by one of the big festivals - Sheffield Doc or Edinburgh - and pull out, others become available at the last minute. Invited guests check their commitments to slot into allocated dates. The programme, which over the past week has been in a state of extreme flux, is clicking together day by day.

Currently my version of the programme schedule - a portion of it, anyway - is looking a bit like this: a series of grids, sellotaped together, with most items in bold, a few gaps, and a lot of annotations. It's a tricky balancing act for David, the Film Programmer, and Naomi, the Festival Director: on the one hand, the pressure to finalise and meet copy deadlines, on the other, retaining enough flexibility to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves at the last minute.

At the other end, I'm fed frequent bulletins and wade and wrestle through copy, the images I've amassed, endless lists (film titles, events, venues, ticket prices, sponsors ads, etc...) in order to be able to feed it into a rudimentary layout plan so that our designers, Elfen, in Cardiff can pull it all together. Much back and forth to follow.

The brochure is the most important and eagerly-anticipated piece of publicity and it has to meet tight deadlines in order to be ready for the fourth week of January. So, a deep breath, time to plunge back in. Christmas postponed till 24 December.

Do clouds have different linings?

Audience members took time to fill out two sets of questionnaires this year (two festivals to celebrate our tenth birthday). Might their feedback reflect seasonal changes, differences in tone between the two?

With the nifty aid of word cloud generator Tagxedo - you simply copy and paste the whole of the comments column, press submit and customise the appearance - here's the comparison.

Main Festival February 24 to March 11

May Festival 4 to 20 May

























Same but different? Might be the colour palette talking, but the May version seems more, kind of... funky. That figures. It was. Trying out new stuff can be very bracing and we've acquired a taste for it.

From November, a glimmer of May

As November heralds the slide towards winter, here's a reminder of the Borderlines 10th birthday treat: the very idiosyncratic May Festival. New boundaries were broken in terms of open air screenings and pop-up cinemas and we even left the ground with the trial flights that accompanied our weekend at Shobdon Airfield. It's worth remembering however, that it was bloody cold in May, blankets, fake furs, woolly hats and scarves, even hot water bottles were much in evidence.





We certainly won't be able to do anything on this scale on a regular basis but if we  held some outdoor or pop-up screenings in September (often more reliable weather-wise) would you come along?