Combining Virtual and In-person Film Screenings to Create a One-of-a-kind Festival Experience

Miami Dade College’s Miami Film Festival presented a new and challenging request for this year’s festival – the ability to sell tickets to both virtual film screenings, and in-person screenings using a socially-distanced seat map. We worked with the team at Miami Film Festival team to execute on this functionality, and help them produce / ticket the festival given these new parameters that appealed to guests both afar and locally. The final product turned out great, and we wanted to highlight the process in this week’s blog post.

Miami Film Festival is a world-class platform for International and Ibero-American films. Presenting its 38th edition from March 5 – 14, 2021, the Festival showcases the work of the world’s best emerging and established filmmakers to the diverse cosmopolitan community of Miami. Though the 2020 Festival ended prematurely after six days due to COVID-19 concerns, 80% of the programmed films were able to be screened and all jury prizes were awarded remotely. Highlights of the 2020 Festival included the Mercado de Cine Frances y Europeo, which brought together over 40 buyers and sellers from Europe and Latin America; numerous World and International Premieres; and Marquee Conversations with Oscar Winner Juan Jose Campanella and internationally renowned directors Stella Meghie, Joe Talbot, and Lulu Wang, among others.

We are proud to help the festival support all of its virtual offerings (leveraging our Eventive integration) and in-person reserved seating screenings (leveraging our Seats.io integration and their fully opertable social distancing rule sets). The end product is a fully-inclusive software solution that services patrons across a wide range of mediums. Michelle Contreras, who runs operations for MFF, had the following to say about SquadUP’s execution for this year’s festival:

The SquadUP team is amazing. It is really helpful to have people who specialize in our brand of crazy, especially in this really weird situation we’re in.

I know this is how most Festivals will probably have to function from now on, and it’s been pretty interesting to make that transition on our end. However, I think patrons felt comforted that we had both options and felt safer knowing the seat boundaries we put in place. I’m really happy with how everything ran as a whole. It was great to see that in-person events were selling out and that virtual films were also getting attention.

As the country continues to post impressive vaccination numbers and starts to re-open venues across the nation, we will highlight the event organizers who produce amazing experiences for their patrons. We look forward to a roaring-20s style recovery for the events industry as a whole, and are excited to power the next wave of re-openings.

If you have any questions about leveraging SquadUP’s software to power your events, please fill out the demo form below and a member of our sales team will reach out:

http://pages.squadup.com/demo.html