add a lot to your event. Besides lending their name and logo to the marketing material, those sponsors can donate prizes and giveaways – a proven means to drive attendance. Potential sponsors can come from a variety of sources: Industry Dive Manufacturers ▪ Dive Clubs ▪ Underwater Camera Manufac- ▪ turers BUSINESS EDU continued
perience. Never show anything for the first time on the night of the
event, and never assume your equipment will work at the venue. Advance testing is critical to spotting and addressing technical problems and incompatibilities. Best Practices for Underwater Pre- sentations The secret sauce to a successful film festival is careful and uncompromising curation of the material that is submitted. While every presenter is going to be understandably proud of their work, today’s audience is one of shorter at-
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Behind the scenes of a successful Film Festival
tention spans. Ideally, video presentations should run between 8-12 minutes. Longer films can be shown but the shorter time limits allow for more variety, a greater number of speakers and a greater ability to keep the audience engaged. Presentations of still images accompanied by a speaker should similarly be kept short, with only the best images
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Nothing will hurt a film festival more than a poorly produced event. Today’s world is a digital world: make sure your audio/visual technology is working perfectly and is of high quality. Our experience shows that it is best to utilize one computer rather than having each presenter use their own. Always have a backup, though, as computers can fail and having a spare ready to go can be a lifesaver! Make sure that all presentations are submitted well in advance. A good tip to ensure seamless movement from one presentation to the next during the show is to assemble all of the submitted work into one large file (either Keynote on Mac computers, PowerPoint on Windows or one of the other presentation apps available on the market). This avoids the pitfalls of transitioning from one speaker to the next with awkward pauses to start up new presentations. Sometimes, this approach may mean that you might have to tweak the formatting of the submitted material to ensure a seamless ex-
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