Making your event easy to use (film festival screenings in particular)

Pic credit: Dean Leggett

I help run a free film festival in Greenwich (specifically the Charlton and Woolwich Free Film Festival) and every year when preparing the listings I try and keep the following things in mind. My aim is to make it easy for people to know what to expect at our screenings and either reduce or at least draw attention to any barriers.

1. Subtitles / captions

If a film screening can be subtitled then that helps to include people who are d/Deaf or who have a degree of hearing loss or audio processing difficulties. Those difficulties can also be exacerbated by the acoustics of the venue. 

Even people with good or perfectly adequate hearing (me!) can pick up extra stuff they'd not even realised they'd missed. For me it helps solidify how place or character names are spelled which generally helps me remember and know what's going on. 

Subtitles do exclude people who find them a visual distraction though. They also tend to appear on-screen just before the character speaks them, so can ruin the joke or flow a bit. 

It's fine to have no subtitles but the most important thing is to state whether a film will have them or not. Just let people know.

Also if you are subtitling a film that gives you access to another advertising venue: http://yourlocalcinema.com/

In my own listings I've used the "Regional Indicator Symbol Letter S" to denote subtitled events 🇸

2. ♿️ Wheelchair accessibility: venue and loos

A venue may be wheelchair accessible but if the screening room is upstairs and there's no lift... not so much. If possible visit the venue yourself and see but if you are able-bodied you may miss some subtle things that seem fine but which might be a barrier or annoyance to someone using a wheelchair. A good website to check a venue's accessibility is https://www.accessable.co.uk/ - with information gathered by people who've visited a site and know what to look out for.

For a film screening many people can manage the couple of hours duration without needing a loo, but others will need to know the loo situation, particularly if coming from work or elsewhere. It's a helpful kindness to say in your advertising blurb if there is only a standard loo or if it's accessible. Emojis are a quick shorthand but do also write it out for users of screenreaders.

♿️ 🚽 ❌
   
♿️ 🚽 ✅

3. Different exits?

This one is my pet peeve and I've been to two events which caused me a bit of stress on leaving as I'd not been aware before the screening that we'd all be leaving a park by a different gate from the ones we'd come in by. 

Open air park screenings are fantastic but parks often close during the screening and everyone is shuttled through a single exit. This can be a bit of an unpleasant surprise. Sometimes there's a financial cost too, e.g. I can walk into the top of Greenwich Park and walk home from the same gate, but if we're all leaving by Cutty Sark at the bottom that's a bus ride home or a longer walk up a steep hill. Fine, but helpful to be able to plan for this (particularly, I would assume, for people using wheelchairs). 

Also for me personally, having no sense of direction I prefer to know exactly where I'm heading for on leaving and can't necessarily guarantee a good signal to get that info from the CityMapper app!

 

4. What3Words location markers

These are super helpful for outdoor events where people might need to know the location of any preferred (nearest, or where the ticket-checkers are) entrance, the exit and the actual screening area if a walk is involved. Adding a link to the Google Maps map is also very helpful as people can zoom in and see what the nearest bus stops are, plus other transport options or nearest car park.

This one will give you a nice view of the row of cherry trees in April: stay.path.wizard

I remember the first time I saw my colleague Paul do magic at a work event I was at. It was great fun anyway but he also linked some of the science of the tricks to the science behind the work that we were doing (medical device safety) and honestly my mind was just ever so slightly blown by that. 

He and our colleague Peter McOwan (who died in 2019) at QMUL used magic to talk about computing and maths topics as well as human-computer interaction, particularly in schools talks. One example is that a trick has a set of steps to be followed (a bit like a computer algorithm) and also a method of getting the audience to 'look over there' (a bit like the user experience). 

Paul's just published a book (co-written with Peter with additional material added after Peter's death) called Conjuring with Computation which is for sale, but almost all of Paul and Peter's magic-themed output via CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun) is completely free, and brilliant. 

There are lots of fascinating overlaps between magic and computational thinking, and lots of discussion about teaching computational thinking in schools. It has wide applicability (a way of approaching and solving tasks that can be useful beyond programming). 

This thought now keeps popping into my head: should magic be taught in schools? And if so what would the curriculum be...

I'm neither a teacher nor a magician but in line with my series of "Imaginary" posts here's what I have let my mind come up with while on longer bus journeys...

Magic Circle - 15th Century manuscript via Wikipedia

 

✨ Imaginary GCSE Magic ✨

Firstly it would be super interdisciplinary, linking to other different curricula including history, maths, chemistry and so on. See how we've sneaked computing into various other subjects in our 'Computing and...' interdisciplinary computational thinking page. Also I came up with an interdisciplinary game (Combining Careers) where you pick two topics and try and come up with a job that incorporates both - I think this was inspired by hearing about a Cow Historian on the TV programme Coast and learning about a Hairdressing Archaeologist who works out how complex hairdos of yore were actually put together.

Presentation skills 🖥
A bit of showmanship is quite handy when doing magic tricks, learning how to work with and respond to an audience, that sort of thing. Obviously a magician pretty much also has to lie to their audience so I might not want to take that too far with a classroom - but the audience know they're being led a merry dance at least.

The importance of practice
You can't just learn a trick and then do it, it needs repeated application and effort - a useful thing to learn.

Critical thinking skills, spotting pseudoscience
I remember reading or hearing James Randi say that the faces of 'psychics' would blench somewhat when they knew he was in the audience. The strategies of cold-reading and hot-reading can be (mis)used to give the impression of supernatural knowledge, or used to debunk nonsense. General 'logical thinking' skills, always useful.

History
You could really go to town on the history of magic (both as a form of entertainment as well as a deliberate deception). The history of women accused of witchcraft and how they were treated too 🧙‍♀️.

Botany and chemistry etc ⚗️
I think the Harry Potter-ish aspects of Herbology and Potions can definitely be included here. I like to think that either the text books or lab notebooks can be made to look a bit steampunk too, with lots of lovely drawings and doodles in the margins. Anyway the chemistry syllabus in its entirety is magic, converting one thing to another and emitting colourful light 🎨  and heat 🔥and useful products. Practicals would definitely include re-creating 'mauveine' from highly dangerous chemicals and making explosions 🧨 from metals in water etc. 

Poisonous and hallucinatory plant products would get an airing - I suspect my GCSE wouldn't pass health and safety checks. Plants are also inherently magical, turning light and carbon dioxide into glucose and oxygen.

Also the history of folk beliefs and superstitions, and plant-based cures for various ailments.

Psychology
Obvious things like 'how are we fooled?' and how to avoid getting duped (incredibly widely applicable!). I might also bring in things like sound design in TV/film/theatre and film scores and how they can augment what an audience is feeling

Physics
I don't really know much about quantum stuff but it sounds pretty magical, possibly that can be incorporated!

Drama / acting
I think it's pretty magical that a person on stage can say some words and affect the emotional state of the audience, even without fancy set design.

Film / CGI
Literally creating something from nothing through the medium of pixels. Miraculous.

Religion
The nature of believing something which may or may not be true.

Maths and magic
This is already pretty well mapped out (we have some books on Maths and magic^^) but thing like trigonometry, Fibonacci weirdness, solving problems, mathematical curiosities. Also Islamic and Celtic art and patterns follow maths structures and the result is pretty magical but I may be stretching the meaning somewhat :)

Music
A nice mix of physics, maths, acoustics and emotion. It's basically alchemy.

What would you have in your Imaginary GCSE Magic course?