The New Zealand International Film Festival is a national event extending the cinematic options of audiences and filmmakers throughout New Zealand. An international programme of between 150-170 features and short films is presented nationwide every year. Having volunteered with the festival for the previous four years, it was a huge honour and thrill to join the team full-time for the 2019 festival and work on content creation and social media management.
The 2019 Festival included films such as La Belle Époque (2019), Herbs: Songs of Freedom (2019), the Aretha Franklin documentary Amazing Grace (2018), Bellbird (2019), Francis Ford Coppola's "final cut" of the legendary Apocalypse Now (1979), Come to Daddy (2019) and Apollo 11 (2019). It was also where New Zealanders first saw future classics like Midsommar (2019) and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). All up, 155 feature-length programmes from 47 countries screened across 13 towns and cities around New Zealand from July to September.
On this page are videos and trailers I created in my role at the Festival. These were used across social media to help market film screenings and events.
The "Keen to have your mind warped?" trailer was designed to represent films from the Incredibly Strange collection in the Festival, which is best summarised by this description from the 2020 programme: "Midnight movies, cult oddities, outstanding genre cinema – in other words, films selected to keep you wide awake and save us from respectability by Ant Timpson, founder of the legendary Incredibly Strange Film Festival." The films included in this trailer are Angelo (2018), Apocalypse Now: Final Cut (2019), The Hole in the Ground (2019), In Fabric (2018), Knife+Heart (2018), Midsommar (2019), Monos (2019) and We Are Little Zombies (2019).
We filmed the second video on the night of the Wellington Programme Launch, featuring spontaneous interviews with patrons to hear what they were most looking forward to seeing in the Festival.
The trailer for "Animation NOW!" was played at Academy Cinemas in Auckland before select film screenings, and the video promoting the "For All Ages" films was later re-distributed by its sponsors Square Eyes Film Foundation and used to help them market the films.
Often short or independent films lack the budgets or people on-hand who can record the production process as behind-the-scenes clips, or create anything resembling a trailer before a distributor becomes involved. To help with this, I came up with a video template that could be used to promote the finalists of the New Zealand's Best Short Film Awards - which had been selected by director Jane Campion - and for the films Births, Deaths and Marriages (2019) and Mo Te Iwi – Carving For The People (2019). These videos were my first created for the Festival, raising awareness of the films and encouraging people to attend the screenings.
Click the thumbnails below to watch the videos.
I worked with the social media manager to co-ordinate content and release schedules, with my first priority being partners and sponsors. I also established NZIFF's podcasting presence using the Anchor platform, and prepared official regionalised film lists for Letterboxd users to browse. Below is a selection of some of the posts that appeared on social media.
