How to broadcast a Film Festival online successfully?
For more than ten years, ACAMPADOC has brought young talented people from Latin America and the rest of the world closer to promote the preservation of cultural heritage. Each year, ACAMPADOC showcases its students’ film productions in the International Documentary Film Festival. Furthermore, face-to-face workshops are organized to train future talents in the production and making of documentary films.
Nevertheless, lockdown and social distancing disrupted the plans that had been made for ACAMPADOC 2020. However, canceling the festival was not an option: “This year, we had high expectations for the admission of new students who find in the festival a space for training and promoting their documentary film productions and, therefore, we could not cancel it,” says Irina.
“We were the first institution to promote documentary films in Central America during the pandemic, teaching 17 online documentary film and heritage courses synchronously through Zoom, which was all possible thanks to CanopyLAB. We must say that both the students and teachers were very satisfied with the experience ”.
– Irina Ruíz, directora de ACAMPADOC.
Therefore, both the film festival and the training courses had to be redesigned and offered online. For Irina and her team, this transition seemed to be an impossible task since they did not have a suitable online platform or professional assistance. They realized that they needed a platform where they could upload course content all while maintaining a social connection between teachers and students.
After a lot of research, they decided to try different learning platforms, and that is how they found CanopyLAB, a platform that suits their needs perfectly given its user-friendliness, ability to participate in video calls without leaving the website and social network, which enabled interactions among all the participants.
“CanopyLAB allowed us to give basic, practical-theoretical, and intensive training that facilitated our students’ learning and as a result, we have 19 short films this year,” says the director.
A platform that can connect filmmakers around the world
From setting up meetings with her teaching staff to figuring out the things they could do online, to the creation of courses, Irina points out that the platform’s friendly design made the teachers’ work easier. They were able to create the festival’s courses and share the materials in an organized and safe way. Moreover, the chat function and the CanopyLAB news section allowed interaction between students and their teachers, allowing constant communication in real-time.
Through the implementation of CanopyLAB’S platform, both the 9th ACAMPADOC International Documentary Film Festival and the Film School went ahead successfully.
“This experience was highly appreciated by our students. In fact, they were so impressed with our performance that we were invited to the University of Costa Rica to give a presentation on participatory methodologies, where I highlighted how CanopyLAB was the platform that gave us the seed to grow in an environment that was new to us and obtain the results we achieved, which exceeded our production goals. Many people in this business are surprised by what we have achieved given that it has not been possible for them yet ”, Irina concludes.
ACAMPADOC has many plans for 2021 and because of the success they had with the 2020 festival, they hope that new students will sign up and beat the records that they achieved last time.
“This experience was highly appreciated by our students. In fact, they were so impressed with our performance that we were invited to the University of Costa Rica to give a presentation on participatory methodologies, where I highlighted how CanopyLAB was the platform that gave us the seed to grow in an environment that was new to us and obtain the results we achieved, which exceeded our production goals. Many people in this business are surprised by what we have achieved given that it has not been possible for them yet”
Irina Ruíz, directora de ACAMPADOC.
