Arts Activities Support

We think that the quantitative outcomes of the festival are disproportionate to our size. We interweave film with 9 different musical acts throughout the day, and 500 attendees experience 42 different locally made films. There really aren’t any other festivals in the region that do this. The 2016 Square Lake Festival achieved its artistic goals of promoting the underserved artistic communities of experimental, animation and short film. We achieved this goal via a sold out festival that featured some of the most popular music acts of the Twin Cities. Generally speaking, attendees frequent our event for the intimate music experience with acts that generally play much larger events. Though drawn to the music, the artistic program is 50% film, so these same attendees leave the event with an increased awareness and appreciation for locally made, independent film. What worked really well this year was the increased number of film scores. Each year we commission a film score, but in 2016 we knew of two different film score projects that we wanted to include. One was a locally produced, feature length animation. We’ve always wanted to use a local animation for the film score. The other was a film score project called Seven Secrets of Snow. We challenged ourselves by digging deeper into our unique event identity, and it worked. We sold out the show, and we did something that few other events are doing. Something we’d do differently if we could go back in time would be to emphasize our radius clause in performer contracts. Radius clauses are requests from the venue for a contracted performer to not play another show in a competing market for a certain amount of time prior to and after the event. This year, our headliner booked a free local show the day after our event, and we felt its impact on our ticket sales. We had requested a radius clause, but the booking agent made a mistake. We recovered, through hard work and networking to sell remaining tickets, but this is something that took a lot of time and was frustrating for us. We’d prefer to avoid this in the future, so we’re going to make our own event contract. Generally speaking we did reach our intended community. We received more film submissions than any previous year, and many of these submissions came from outside the core-Metro area. Our event has witnessed a change in attendees over the last five years, with more coming from suburban areas than in the past where most came from core-Metro. I would not describe the actual community served any differently than I did in our initial proposal. Our outreach efforts did result in community diversity, especially in respect to our film festival submissions. Going back 7 years, there was a popular film festival submission website called Withoutabox.com. We could never afford to use this service, as it required a $2,000 up front fee in order to collect submissions for the low price we wanted to charge. However, about 5 years ago, a new service became available called FilmFreeway.com This service has no upfront fees, and only charges a small percentage on submissions. FilmFreeway has become very popular, and is a powerful tool for us to reach filmmakers all across Minnesota. The impact on the diversity of submissions is considerable. Attendees that can’t afford to pay for a ticket can volunteer. In 2016, there were 31 volunteers. Filmmakers that can’t afford to pay the submission fee can ask for a waiver. In respect to volunteers, we accept nearly all volunteer requests that we receive. We also offer reduced admission for bikers. An in respect to film festival waivers, our policy is to offer waivers to all students who request them, and we still consider these applicants for festival prizes.