Festival management in a box

Film festival managment software. Intriguing idea. I suspect that mostly we festival organizers get by with a stuck-together tool kit involving emails, excel spreadsheets, word docs and probably a database. There’s still a lot of paper to stick in folders to go into storage once the festival is over for the year. I think that’s probably because most of us assume that there is no one-stop software suite that fits the quirky set of needs we have. These guys go so far as to say that their tools fit not only film festivals, but other “cultural events”, too.

This is definitely not an ad. I ran across Eventival because the guys who designed this are presenting it at Cannes currently, and it turned up in one of my RSS feeds. According to their website, it’s “the online film festival management system aimed to give you full control over your festival.” When I first posted about this, Ales suggested I also mention DataKal StarBase, (also, oddly enough, hailing from the Czech Republic), which is “a world leading and unique film festival management software solution”.

Interesting. Eventival is designed by former festival programmers. They debuted this 2.0 version of the software in Berlin and seem to have picked up a few fancy looking festivals as clients since then. The DataKal guys also have an impressive roster of clients, including Tribeca. They developed their ‘managing big events’ skills in a slightly different setting. (Military exercises, actually.)

I think that our level (community, volunteer-run) of festival is absolutely not the target market. Eventival at least is ‘software as service’, where it’s all online, and you are paying for access per year, and at our level of things I’d venture to say it’s what we would call ‘prohibitively expensive’. DataKal comes in a box as installable software, but also has service and support, depending on your contract. I couldn’t find out from the website how much it costs, unfortunately.

I’m posting about it because I think it shows how far the film festival has come; and that for some smarties out there there’s money to be made. Somehow an industry really is appearing/has appeared. Movies and audiences and filmmakers and distribution deals, sure. But not only.

If you’re so inclined, check out Eventival and/or DataKal.

UPDATE
The director of Mezipatra, Ales Rumpel, has written to say that his festival will be using Eventival this year for the first time. We’ll be following up with him at the end of the year to see how it went. And he’s very generously offered to answer any questions folks may have if you email him.