The New Jersey Film Festival for Summer 2020
Project Date : Summer 2020
Project Summary
The New Jersey Film Festival is New Jersey’s largest continuing public film series devoted to “experimental, offbeat and influential cinema”. It is held in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It was started in 1981 and is hosted by Albert Gabriel Nigrin. The Festival began in 1982.
Due to the pandemic, the summer film festival was going to be canceled. Therefore ending their streak and isolating another community during the pandemic. We teamed up with Rutgers Summer Session to see if we could help the New Jersey Film Festival continue for its 39th anniversary. I pitched the idea of also giving the students something to look forward to when we get back on campus. Thanks to Summer Session, all students that attended the films received a free popcorn voucher for the Rutgers Cinema. This was a way to bring some positivity back to the community.
I used a combination of Canvas, our learning management system, and Big Blue Button Conference to limit viewership to enrolled students and some Rutgers Staff. We were able to pull this event off with about 3 weeks of planning.
I took care of hosting each screening. Each Friday in June 2020 and again for an encore month in July 2020. I also took care of the back end of making sure all the films were in the highest viewing quality given our choice of online venue.
I loved working with our collaborators and figuring our solutions for their tight requirements. Problem solving is really enjoyable and I loved being able to figure out how to get things working. This event was extremely rewarding to work on since this was the 39th anniversary of the New Jersey Film Festival. According to Nigrin, the films were all selected before the move to virtual screenings was made. With our swift collaboration, we were able to keep this going on a super low budget. I’m happy to report we had over 100 attendees!
Finally I got to outsource and work with local artists for the screening nights movie posters. I loved pulling this all together! Every night we aired a successful showing; I felt great joy in playing my part in making this happen.
