Fast Forward Film Festival

Grassroots for the Environment

The Cause Collaborative had been directing, event planning, and marketing the Fast Forward Film Festival (FFFF) since its inception. Each year, optimizing the filmmaker submission process, growing local mentors and technology resources, and building relationships with local school districts to bring the Festival mission and arts opportunities into elementary and adolescent classrooms to build up novice participation.

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When I first joined the agency as a Marketing and Communications Intern, I focused my work for the 2018 festival on inspiring college-level students to participate. Motivating college students to go beyond their academic requirements can often be difficult - especially when the opportunity involves time commitment or learning a new skill. Students across campuses also needed to hear that their ideas about environmental issues, fears, sustainability, and solutions were valid and worthy of movie theatre screen time.

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The strategy to reach students on multiple campuses involved: eliciting help through an Ambassador Program, oversight of the ambassadors, campus tabling, classroom visits and presentations, and outreach to student-run science, sustainability, journalism, theatre, and film clubs. By first developing the parameters for an Ambassador Program, working with our designer for program marketing collateral, and recruiting an ambassador from every major college and university around Rochester, NY, we were able to ensure that the information and tools for participation in FFFF were across all campuses and communicated to students, by students. Our communications with specific clubs and professors also helped to integrate festival film submissions into the curriculum of film and sustainability classes at St. John Fisher College, RIT, and Nazareth College.

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For the 2018 Fast Forward Film Festival, I (atypically) positioned myself in front of the news camera, hit the halls at local colleges, and trained and managed a team of other college students as an ambassador for the festival and mission myself.