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>> Well, hello everybody. How are you all?
>> Doing well, thanks.
>> Fantastic. So Chris Jr,
perhaps you could maybe lead off and
introduce yourself and introduce
the other members of your team here
representing the Chattanooga Film Festival.
>> Absolutely, I am Chris Dortch II.
I'm the founder and
the lead film programmer for the Chattanooga Film Festival,
and I'm very lucky that all the other people on
this call tolerate me and answer my calls at all.
The silver fox that you're
seeing on your monitor right there is CD I,
Chris Dortch Sr, the OG, Chris.
In the corner there you see Paul and Tim,
the geniuses from media team who,
Tim is not only an alumni filmmaker and
a dear friend of the festival part of our family.
Media team are helping us make every bit of
the live event side of
this thing work and make it something special,
and not just a bunch of clickable VOD.
>> So the Chattanooga Film Festival,
you started that back in 2014,
and so this year you are looking forward to
your seventh film festival,
which if I recall correctly,
was going to be live in person in Chattanooga last month,
but I'm guessing that didn't happen.
>> It did not. It was genuinely
heartbreaking because the day we had to make
our postponement was the day that we
were ready to pull the trigger on
our first wave of films for the year.
>> Chris Sr, so in the moment and tell me, where was your head at?
What were you thinking you're going to do?
Were you thinking you were going to scrap
the festival and what changed in your mind?
>> When that e-mail came from Microsoft,
it was like a gift from above.
We had no idea that we were on
their radar and we're just thrilled.
We had some trepidation because Chris is a perfectionist,
and that's both his blessing and his curse,
and he didn't want to do a film festival unless we could have
a representative Chattanooga Film Festival,
and have the right amount of film and entertainment.
So our first call was to our buddy Tim.
We love Tim and his crew and we knew
that they could help us achieve this,
and lo and behold,
they're already using Microsoft teams.
So when the Microsoft group found out about that,
they thought my son was a genius,
but actually he just called his friend Tim,
and they were already well-versed in Microsoft Teams.
So it's kind of like
these puzzle pieces have fit
together as though they were meant to be.
>> Chris Jr, tell me a little bit about,
you mentioned earlier on that,
it sounded like in the first instance you were
thinking about how do we pull this off online?
>> To me, I think about CFF as sort of a movie mix tape,
and every year I try to curate this mix tape,
and this format has allowed that mix tape to almost have
this now found footage kind of a VHS feeling to it.
It feels like just an incredible collection of odds and ends that
celebrate film in a way that I really do
feel like rival what we do on the ground.
>> This might not be an isolated incident,
and even if we have a physical film festival next year,
I think we're going to have to be
including some kind of online component.
I think you're going to see every film festival
start to understand this.
And what I think we really
want to do is just get ahead of the ball and be like,
"We can pull this off,
but also we can make it
special and on-brand and all these things.".
>> What I'm hearing is
even in a world where you get back in the same room together,
and you get your core constituency,
this is almost accelerating
your ability to move out and connect to a broader,
wider audience as well.
>> We had to find ways to translate those production values that,
I really do want this to feel
like Willy Wonka made a film festival.
I wanted you to feel like you're into tour this bananas,
chocolate factory with magic
around every corner and every bit of it,
I hope makes you fall in love with movies a little bit more,
and not just I hope movies, but movie buffs.
They make you feel like you're part of a larger community.
When this virus started to take
down the thing I hold most dear in the world,
movie theaters, I didn't want to
be one of the people who'd just mourning that forever.
I wanted to be on that next wave and
figure out how movies could stay alive throughout all this.
>> What have you gained in you as sort of appreciation for,
and are most excited to see come to fruition
using the technology and the film festival?
>> I was worried about it feeling clinical or isolated,
and I'm finding that it doesn't.
I'm finding that I'm experiencing the same joy seeing these folks
on my computer screen as I am often on the ground.
>> Definitely. Tim and Paul, what are your thoughts?
What are you most looking forward to seeing
come to fruition with the technology?
>> For me, I'm
most interested in how the technology
will translate the experience.
This kind of the mania around a film,
and it always feels fun and spooky and like you're in on the joke,
and I just kind of want that to be what comes
across in the live programming sections of it.
>> This kind of feels like a crazy pay off for us in
a way where I think we've spent a long time and a lot
of our careers figuring out online and
streaming and the sort of how do you do
this in the weird interactive way,
and then it's like the whole world gets turned upside
down and it turns out that's
the only thing that's relevant anymore.
>> Awesome. Chris Sr, what are you most looking forward to?
>> All we really care about are films and filmmakers.
So this platform is going to give
us an audience like we'd never dreamed of.
It's a miracle almost in
these crazy times as something like this can happen,
and we just want to help out.
>> It's funny in that this is kind of a wonderful story that
has come out of COVID that maybe wouldn't have happened otherwise.
You're coming together to create something that
you didn't know the world needed.
But I think the world is going to be grateful to
have even after COVID.
>> If this is what we got to
work with, we're going to roll with it.
>> Fantastic. Well, I wish you all the
very best with the festival and
thanks for spending the time with me today.
>> Thank you so much.
>> Cheers.
>> We really appreciate it.
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