RAI FILM Festival Placement
Media Production assistant
In 2023 I undertook a placement at the RAI Film Festival as part of their media production team. My role mainly consisted of producing content to advertise and document the festival, through editing trailers and photographing the event.
I was assigned the edit of the ‘Main Competition’ category, which had to be a maximum of one minute and portray the values of the RAI Film Festival - a blend between Anthropology's academic side and the visual medium and the broader public, embracing the introduction of new ideas from different fields.
Main Competition trailer
PORTRAYING RAI'S VALUES
The production team wanted the trailer to be fresh and dynamic to incite the younger generation and broader public to attend the festival.
This posed a challenge on how to merge the different visual styles and themes of the films in a short trailer without appearing like a slideshow, besides making the dark-themed films look upbeat. Because it was the ‘Main Competition’ trailer, I was able to select visually powerful shots to showcase such status and use any attention-grabbing and/or fresh feeling shots that worked together, without constraints on portraying a specific theme.
I wanted to create a cohesive and unified edit to highlight that, despite their different approaches, they were all valid ethnographic films. Playing with tempo to go in and out of the “dynamic” films to the slower-paced ones was useful to merge their different rhythms; as well as matching action to music to make clips acquire a sense of belonging to a constant point of reference (the soundtrack), enhancing continuity.
However, I started off with a slower-paced song for the static yet powerful shots to stay longer, grasp attention/anticipation, and be representative of some film’s serious themes – yet quickly fading the song into a different, fast-percussion one to pace “upbeat” shots; constructing a narrative that broke the “traditional academic aesthetic” and played with expectation and anticipation to attract audiences.
RAI FILM Festival 2023 Trailer
ADAPTING TO FORMATS AND MEDIUMS
I had to translate the trailer to different media platforms. Whilst for RAI’s website, Youtube and Facebook a longer version was effective, Instagram’s Reels had a shorter time span to grab attention, hence the slower introduction was erased to give way to the upbeat feel since the beginning, as well as changing the aspect ratio from landscape to portrait and re-adjusting the framing of the shots.
I also edited a trailer version of each film for a ‘Main Competition Award’ “recap” when giving out the prices. I had to shorten the theme of each film to approximately 20 seconds. Hence, I focused on identifying an audio clip that summarised the theme or posed the struggles of the subjects, alongside any introductory and climatic shots to remember the narrative and subjects.
Main Competition Awards (Summary of films)
EVENT PHOTOGRAPHY
I was assigned as the photographer for the in-person event at Watershed. I documented roundtables, conferences, screenings and reception drinks.
I aimed to get bright images that would have a fresh, lightened look, with focus on people interacting, framing subjects in between others, and using shallow depth of field to appear crowded whilst bringing attention to people discussing, networking, or participating in an activities.
Since all events took place in the same spaces (Watershed’s cinema and events room, and Arnolfini’s theatre), to avoid the photographs looking similar, I looked for different angles and framings to provide dynamism/variation and highlight each activity’s purpose: for lectures/talks, people taking notes, the presenters, and an attentive audience; for screenings, a busy public; for workshops, discussions and in-betweens, people conversing and busy, vibrant gatherings.
