Grace Conley Capstone

Over the course of my senior year, I worked to put on the She’s Reel Film Festival with my best bud and co-creator Ruby Ginsburg. The She’s Reel Film Festival is a festival made by young female filmmakers, for young female filmmakers. We wanted to give artists like us from the Greater Philadelphia Area a platform to have their art showcased and awarded. The final product is a combination of many works. The first being our virtual festival. This was an hour-long festival that we streamed on youtube, we awarded 11 films, and the video now has 200 views. Along with this is a youtube playlist of all of the official selections.

I have broken down the process of putting on this festival into three stages, stage one being the conceptualizing and branding stage. This is where we made decisions about the ethics of our festival, created all of the guidelines, and made our brand. We made a logo, color palette, name, slogan, Instagram page, and website. After that is stage two, the marketing and organizing stage. Here we searched for a venue, created a budget, found judges, created a timeline, pitched to Braskem, received full funding, posted on Filmfreeway, and then started accepting submissions. Stage three was the presentation stage. Here we had to switch our festival from in-person to virtual, learned how to stream, had the judges score the films, analyzed the results, assigned awards, created a script, highlight reel, and slide show for the virtual festival, and then hosted it. After the main event was over we designed and ordered swag for our festival and crafted homemade She’s Reel gift boxes that I hand-delivered to every submitter, judge, friend, parent, mentor, and supporter of our festival.

I learned a lot over the course of this project. I learned how to effectively collaborate, how to stay organized and follow a schedule, how to strengthen a community, and how much better it is to complete a project when it’s something you’re truly passionate about. I’m really proud of this project, for all it did to help me grow as a person and the joy it brought to the community of young female filmmakers in Philadelphia.

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