When all university operations moved online as a result of the pandemic, our Shared Spaces closed and with the closing came the cancellation of many events. One of the bigger events that we were about to host in Space 2435 was the Off The Screen of the Ann Arbor Film Festival. The festival quickly, and successfully, moved its entire event to a live stream format, making the Ann Arbor Film Festival not only the oldest avant-garde and experimental film festival in North America, but now also the first film festival to ever go entirely online, currently getting consultations from many other film festivals around the world on how to make this shift, including those at Tribeca. Who would have known!
Do you want to know what it took to move this complex film operation of endless logistics to stream online within just a week? Tom Bray, Converging Technologies Consultant and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art and Design at UM, who also serves as the Technical Director for the AAFF and with whom we work closely in Space 2435 during this event, shows us the behind the scenes:
