(Via WireService.ca) The 30th edition of VIFF’s Industry Conference has ended on a rather high note this year. There were 1685 delegates attending, along with 104 guest speakers. To begin, the conference held the VIFF Industry Exchange, a new stream introduced this year. Working alongside CMPA-BC which is Canada’s leading digital web content marketplace, this was a two-day program with 45 agencies, executives, and brands that helped implement connections thus form durable relationships for business.
Continuing on the entertainment business came the third official edition of the Power to the Indie Program and Lab, a private course that offered strategy tips for six filmmaking teams. Tips, strategies, and lessons in this course covered the bases of direct product distribution, crowd funding, marketing, and other fields of audience engagement. Many of this information came courtesy of principals in Gravitas Ventures, FilmBuff, CineCoup, Twenty Year Media, Distribber, Dotstudioz, Amplify Releasing, Seed&Spark, and Veria Search Media Marketing.
Another newly released stream was Virtual Reality, which stayed at the front of the VIFF Industry, and discussed equipment, production, and distribution from different perspectives. The discussions focused heavily on the topics of storytelling and engagement while they examined the exciting possibilities of Virtual Reality. The stream also discussed how this technology reached through many genres and showcased Virtual Reality films, including Catatonic, which seated people in a special chair that brought them through a virtually scary asylum.
Finally, the third new stream at the industry conference was the DNA of Discoverability, which explained how to gain and build an audience in an environment like YouTube. The guest speakers went into details of discovering a business model within this video data, as well as how content creators get their material noticed, key trends that improve the production, and details that help get the content watched and shared majorly.