WHAT IS IT FOR?
Running a festival is a labour of love. The dedication and passion it requires makes many festival organisers see their burden as an intrinsic part of their work. Selecting films, attracting the audience, and raising funds for events bringing no apparent economic benefit is always going to be tough.
If you think you are a good festival manager, and have the best possible staff, the question is: can something improve your work? Can technology improve it?
Recently, it changed the film industry, by creating new media that increased the worldwide circulation of films. Film festivals proliferated, and as an "alternative to film distribution", saved many non-mainstream films from sinking info history by providing a platform festival audience could enjoy them. This, however, also had negative impacts, mainly on the quality of films that "make it" to festivals (and are "made for" them). The false belief that whoever can hold a digicam can be an artist has already turned the virtual film festival universe into a mad intersection where filmmakers search for the perfect destinations for their films while festival programmers scrape for talented filmmakers amidst wannabees.
More films, more festivals, more screenings, more travel, more stress. Software companies do not have the economic motivation or experience to tread the festival jungle, which is why most festival-oriented tools aiming to give festivals greater impact and visibility while saving their costs and effort originated within the industry. However, festival organisers often remain unaware of their existence. If you are reading this, it may change.
WHAT IS EVENTIVAL?
Eventival 2.0 is a web application for managing film
content and contacts related to it as its creators or audience. It can
also serve other institutions working with films, such as film
commission, councils, institutes, archives, museums and galleries.
TECHNICAL CHARACTERISTICS
The application is programmed in the PHP/MySQL application environment using the Symfony (www.symfony-project.org) framework. This architecture is secure and scalable, and facilitates easy and transparent upgrades.
DATA SAFETY
The data is stored with professional and reputable hosting companies that guarantee regular data backup, minimising data losses in the unlikely event of a server failure. The development releases are deployed on a virtual server in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/) in Ireland. The festivals' data is stored with Active 24 (www.active24.cz), a subsidiary of the Norwegian company Mamut ASA (www.mamut.com), a leading European provider of software solutions and internet services.
SECURITY
A classic festival manager's dilemma of dealing with a multitude of tasks by delegating work while trying not to open space for errors can only be solved by means of a shared online database with access level permissions that vary depending on role and experience.
