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To paraphrase Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘Cinema is an explosion of a Calcuttan’s love for reality’. It is only fair then that this art is revered year-on-year through the Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF). Though the festival lasts for a week, annually – putting it together takes much more time, effort and passion.
Rajat Kayal, Secretary, Government Relations, West Bengal, India
The Kolkata International Film Festival receives over thousands of entries every year. The submission process, for the past 23 editions have been carried out manually. The team at KIFF have to manually execute the festival – from arranging to awarding, making it cumbersome to say the least. Moreover, there is no digital archive of the festival.
Needless to say that the process was daunting for the entrants as well. Until now, they had to mail their documents along with the disk of a copy of their work that they wished to be reviewed to the board at KIFF. Additionally, no changes could be made once the project was submitted.
Brandsum heard the case of KIFF’s trials and suggested not a simple digitization process, but helped them set-up an entire festival management system, online. The team at Brandsum created a digital-first ecosystem for all stakeholders of the festival.
Through this dynamic web portal, the management can create new categories, every year, under which the participants can submit their entries – making the process of submission clear and confusion-free.
Participants are also given the scope to upload a digital link of the cinema that they want to submit. A trailer, the full length feature, supporting images, cinema posters and other necessary collaterals too can be submitted along with the details of the entire cast and crew. They also have the ease to nominate a film under multiple categories from the portal.
Unlike the physical submission, here the participants need not complete the process at one sitting. Participants can save their nomination and complete it as and when to meet the deadline. Upon final submission, the project can be reviewed and adjudged by the team at KIFF.
Since, each submission is docketed, the team at KIFF can track, edit, keep on hold till they finally make it available at the front end. They can also download a PDF file of each submission as and when needed, ensuring complete convenience.
Brandsum has also collected the data from all the submissions – online and offline of previous years to create multiple repositories – be it a directory of directors, actors, other crew members, among others.
The team also benefits from features such as automatic archiving system that leads each nomination to be filed under a designated category or multiple categories.
Another important feature that makes this portal even more convenient for the team at KIFF is dynamic scheduling. From checking a time slot at an available theatre to allotting which feature is to be played, a week to a day’s schedule can be crafted without any overlap. This too can be edited, if need be.
The portal is also pre-populated with 7400 languages, and users can file nominations of their work by choosing a specific language; whereas other users of the portal can search films and work by language and region.
Brandsum has made the portal holistic enough to house even an event gallery. The team can submit images and videos to create an album of an event held in association with KIFF or by KIFF independently.
Hygiene features such as the registration of profiles of users – media/guest/jury or delegate can be done as well. What is interesting though is that the management can offer Role Based Access Control of the portal to all its users, making the portal error and fool proof.
An in-built notification system, sending individual or bulk emails, categorization of the projects, designing and printing invites and pass cards are some of the several other features of the portal that Brandsum created for KIFF.
By creating this event management system, Brandsum has now enabled KIFF to achieve simplification of arranging and executing the entire festival all year round.
