Film Festival!

Today I went to the Cleveland Film Festival and ended up seeing "World's Best Commercials" with one of my roommates. We got there a little bit early (the film was at noon) and I was actually expecting to see more of a crowd than there was. After we bought our tickets, we were directed to stand in line until they were ready to begin seating for the film. I thought that in general, the film festival was pretty well-organized. However, the film that we saw was a little less organized than I'd hoped. There was no type of beginning, middle, or end to the film. It simply started out by showing a commercial; then it went to the next one, then the next, and so on, without any commentary or anything like that. Between each commercial that was shown, a green screen would pop up for a few seconds. The green screen had a lot of information on it, but not much time was given to read through it. I noticed that it showed who submitted the commercial, what company it was for, and the name of the campaign/commercial. At the bottom of the green screen were the hyperlinks "previous" and "next." This led me to believe that perhaps someone was selecting the commercials that we were seeing. There were a few commercials that were shown twice throughout the film, which I found a bit annoying.

BUT, I really enjoyed a lot of the commercials that were presented! I was surprised to note that there were only two or three that I'd seen previous to the film festival. I had a lot of favorites, and definitely could not pick just one. I loved the Crest commercials, with the punchline, "Say anything with a smile." A really creative and funny commercial from the UK is an ad promoting the importance of being aware of bicyclers on the roads. It's definitely worth watching a few times! I encourage you to watch it and find out for yourself what it is about, because if I say it, the effect of the commercial would be ruined.

There were many commercials for Axe, Burger King, Net10, and FedEx. It amazes me the amount of creativity and effort that must be put into making commercials like these. An ad for the LCD Sony Bravia TV must have taken a long time to produce, and I thought it was really cute. I could go on and on listing these commercials, because I wrote nearly every one down and enjoyed them all!

All in all, I enjoyed the film festival. A small side note: if you park at the parking deck, bring in your parking stub to validate your parking so that it's free. If not, it'll cost you about $7 to park for less than three hours!