Film Fest Season in Toronto has started! The ReelWorld Film Festival wraps up this weekend. HotDocs starts next week! The Toronto Jewish Film Festival starts May 7th. And Sprockets International Film Festival for Children starts the week before that, on April 29th.
This year, when trying to make and then share my selections with friends, I discovered that most film festival website suck. Seriously. Most of them don't let you link to individual films -- so it makes it very difficult to send URLs around. Sprockets does, but then they ruin their website by using "click here" EVERYWHERE. The TJFF doesn't even have HTML versions of their film information. They have a link to a PDF labeled "TJFF Mailer". How am I supposed to know that the mailer is the film schedule and descriptions.
All film fest web designers, please, just put a big link at the top of the page labeled "List of Films" and another one labeled "Schedule of Screenings".
The crazy thing is that all these festivals do a great job promoting themselves in print. The Sprockets booklet is great. I haven't seen this year's TJFF book yet, but last year it was phenomenal. HotDocs makes a nice newsprint magazine. It seems that there are still issues with making the online experience as positive and seamless as the offline. What's going to happen when more and more people want to surf these sites via a mobile device. Tiny screen, limited bandwidth. These festival sites need to model the interactions that their site visitors want to do online and then support those interactions. Most of them have tons of content, they just aren't labeled very effectively.
I must say that the Toronto International Film Festival had steadily improved year over year in their online user experience. Their calendar tools are exceptional ... finding movies, adding them to a personal calendar, time comparisons. All really easy to use. Also, their video tutorials on "How to Festival". Really great content. Which makes Sprockets' shitty website all the more disappointing -- because they are part of the same group. (Though the promo spots for TIFF last year were some of of the worst EVER! Was the director sleeping with that chick who danced in meadow barefoot? Terrible.)
So, this year, at HotDocs, I'm seeing:
[Yeah, I had to go into the HTML where there is a Shitload of javascript (Seriously, why are you exposing all that code. Sloppy.) and get the db code for the film and then paste it into a URL. But, hey, for my loyal readers (Roro and Deuce) NOTHING is too much work.]
Oh, I almost forgot, the Inside Out Film Fest is coming up too. April 28th. And the Female Eye Film Festival June 10. And one of my favourites, the Canadian Film Centre's Worldwide Short Film Festival, June 14. IMDB has a great film festival list, though it makes me chuckle that TIFF doesn't have 2005 dates on their site yet, so I had to get them off this list. Sigh. Maybe I'm being unreasonable with the expectation that all this information should be available on-demand, in multiple formats, in an easy-to-use interaction model. But I don't think so. If you want to be taken seriously, particularly in a town like Toronto, you have to raise the bar.