TIFF TIP: Scheduling Pt.1 (The Technique)

What I consider to be Christmas in August is the day the Festival Guidebook and Schedule arrive at my doorstep. This year that day is August 29th and it’s already less than a week away. So before the three day hysteria of studying 349 films, 3AM scheduling debates, and strategic time management exercises, I thought it might be helpful to share my TIFF scheduling technique, and hopefully you, the casual reader will feel inclined to share yours!

The TIFF website traditionally offers a helpful resource to organizing and saving your films with a system called My Film List. You can currently find buttons on the official site that read “+Add”. This will add the film to a master list of films that you have personally selected. You can log in to retrieve this list and even update it to reflect your actual final selections. Its handy and quite easy to use, being that the interactivity resides alongside the film descriptions. I use it to get a head start on my planning the day the schedules go live, simply to create a general list of the films I’m interested in.

But I leave the tool to do only that. It’s useful, but not yet perfect (but who knows, this year may be different). Next, I will print out the schedules from the website by day, for each day I will attend. Sometimes the day’s schedule doesn’t fit onto one page so I’ll have to tape them together vertically. This allows me an easy way to get the entire day’s schedule at a glance. You can also photocopy the pages in the official festival schedule book, but being that I am in Michigan, I do not receive it until Wednesday, so this option allows me an extra day to work. It’s important to note that it’s good to print the pages in black and white as opposed to color. It will make your notes and markings easier to read.

At this point, the selection process begins. I use a pencil to immediately circle anything I know I want to see, and cross off anything I know I don’t want to see. Then with a range of colored highlighters, I will highlight the films that I am interested in ranging from very interested, to hardly interested. I will most likely have more than one copy of each day on hand in order to transfer my findings/notes from the “draft” onto a new “working” version. That just makes it easier for me to read after all the highlighting and pencil markings.

What comes next is determined by the types of films you want to see while there, and what type of festival-goer you consider yourself to be. The next TIIF Tips I post will explore those questions.

Again, feel free to use the Comments section to share your neurotic, systematic, or just plain logical scheduling solutions, to what I consider the three day scramble of TIFF scheduling madness!

TIFF TIP: Research

The full list of films is only a day away. From the point in which the titles go live, this gives you exactly 6 days to get a head start on researching your films prior to receiving the festival guidebook and there is no need to wait for that. There are typically over 350 films each year, and if you end up waiting until the book and schedules go out, then you have a lot of ground to cover in a very short period of time, especially if you plan on attending most of the festival. Now, if you don’t plan on submitting your selections for the advance draw, then you have a bit more time, but you also run the risk of your films selling out before you get tickets.

The most common method to researching is to scour the past press releases for that one or two sentence synopsis. That can help, but it’s not necessarily the most efficient method, nor does it tell you much about each film. Here are a few great tools for researching that are right under your nose:

1. IMDB.com is an incredible resource and houses background info on most releases, even if the film is still in development. If it’s not listed here, there may not be much info elsewhere. Try this site first.



2. Use a search engine to look for the official websites. Many films have websites, even if they don’t have a distributor. These sites can contain a wealth of information, providing summaries, trailers, photo galleries and more.
   


3. Many trailers are added to YouTube for promotional and marketing purposes. This is especially true for the larger more commercial films such as those in the Galas or Special Presentation programs. A good trailer can give you a better idea of the film’s tone and content, something descriptions don’t always convey. But proceed with caution. One of the things I like best about seeing films at TIFF is the ability to go in knowing very little. The experience can be greatly rewarding.
   


4. Check websites and magazines like Variety, Film Comment and Entertainment Weekly. Many of the films that screened previously at Cannes have already been covered to some length in these publications. I just picked up the August issue of Film Comment and there are 14 pages dedicated to the films at Cannes. Some sites have also dedicated specific sections to festivals, like Variety, (see right sidebar). I will be posting more links to similar sites as they go live and as the festival draws near.

What did I leave out? Share your film researching methods in the comments section. I will be sure to link to additional resources as they appear.