If you Google the 2021 Casco Bay Anchors Film Festival you will find a host of student-made films of various themes and time limits. You will also find small anchor-shaped awards that are given out to the winners of respective categories. This black-tie student event that happens annually in Falmouth Maine was included in the town’s 300th anniversary and is often on the high school seniors’ final day of school. This event is seen as a senior send-off in a way and is one of the biggest days of the school year. But the fact of the matter is that these films wouldn’t always have had a place to be shown, in fact, even the festival existing is impressive, but to get a look into what “Getting To Wow!” looked like for this project, we have to rewind.
In 2015, I hosted the first-ever Casco Bay Anchors Film Festival, an annual fee to creators event in Cumberland County Maine. This festival drew in a crowd of 200+ and was the first student film festival of its kind in the state of Maine. But before the lights went up, the skit was performed, and the films were submitted, there was something that had to go into all of it, planning and a bit of good entrepreneurial business.
In 2014, the first inkling of an idea came into the Falmouth High School’s Film Club, “why let an organization that has nothing to do with film run a film festival when there is a dedicated group who wants to?” The idea was simple: see a problem, identify a solution, and make it better. The solution was not quite easy, as another group, the “Kids Helping Kids” club, was running the festival and was unwilling to give it up. So, with no school funding, and minimal teacher support we set to negotiations, what terms would be fair enough to allow the film festival to be completely under the film club? After a few weeks of negotiations, it was finally decided that the “Kids Helping Kids” would take 10% of the box office revenue for the night and run a concessions booth. This deal was beneficial to both parties, in exchange for continued future control of the festival the film club gave up 10% of the box office for 1 year. The next step was grant writing and going through the process to have the grant approved, which did not happen easily. Our first thought was to ask parents in the local area for money, but as it turned out no one wanted to support an idea without structure/teacher oversight. So in order to make something long-lasting that would be able to continue on long after we left, we needed help from people who thought like us and wanted a place to proudly display their works with a dose of healthy competition.
Our help was already present, the librarian who was in support of the club and even let us use his room for club meetings. Being a small business owner in the summer and a librarian for a public school he was no stranger to grant writing. With his help, we managed to submit a grant proposal to the Falmoth Lyons club, which agreed to finance $5,000 of the festival, which was incredible as it gave us more opportunity than before.
We then needed students who shared our vision and wanted to help the club and the festival grow. This meant that the film club had to advertise more during the school year, not just specifically in regards to the festival. After ensuring that the festival itself would be under our control, we devoted sections of our regular film club meetings to adding members of the festival committee. This helped make sure that both films were being made and that the festival stayed on track.
Using the $5,000 we got as a grant we got to work!
The first thing to do was to make movie posters in the same size that you would see in theaters. This needed to be funded as the school's printers were good but expensive when printing larger images, so to help offset the cost, we used grant money. There was the matter of getting things for presenters, making name tags, and doing all the behind-the-scenes, like queuing the lights, taking account of seating, preparing some free food for filmmakers. The money was spent advertising the festival and buying the final awards.
As the host, it was important for me to memorize the films and the filmmakers, and organize and execute the opening skit, and help with the festival set up and take down. This included a press wall, arranging for all the posters to be set up in such a fashion that they could be seen on the way in, and filmmakers could show off the movie like it was a real theatre. With our faculty host, we managed to pull together a fun Breakfast club-Esque skit in order to kick off the whole event, which ended with me in the iconic Breakfast Club pose (the one from the end of the movie that freeze frames) as the lights faded out. The festival began after a small speech and the rest, as they say, is history.
From left to right Ania Wright, Phillip Hobby, and Winslow Robinson, the first hosts of the Anchors Film Festival
I knew the event was a Wow experience from the first moment that the doors opened! We had been cautiously optimistic, thinking we would draw a modest crowd of 20-80 people, like in years past. When the doors opened we instantly had the number that we were worried about hitting the whole time, and then the number kept going up! By the time the doors closed, we had amassed a crowd of at least 200 people. When the lights came up on the skit, it was hard not to be all smiles, but the actor in me knew that the show must go on, so with that, we kicked off the first-ever Anchors Film Festival.
We decided to increase our profit the next year by charging an admission fee that could be pre-booked and easy to confirm. This made sure that in the future we may not have to rely on the generosity of the Falmouth Lyons Club while growing a stockpile of resources for the next year. We took steps to go from the existing Festival to a bigger and more successful festival that had 11 submissions within its first year. The submissions were numerous and had more trials and tribulations than was stated in the article. It took many debates, interventions, and arguments to get to a successful student-organized film festival where we felt satisfied with the work. But ultimately, “Getting to Wow!” was worth it, because the original organizers get to look back on a festival they started with a sense of pride and accomplishment. The desire of getting to Wow as a team was incredible and we were so proud of the final result!
Thinking back, it was working through until the end. We wanted to make the festival an absolute blockbuster event, and within one year we had expanded to two schools whose students were interested in participating in the festival. That year we rebranded from the Falmouth Anchors to the Casco Bay Anchors Film Festival, and we never looked back. If I were to provide a message from all of this, I would say that hard work does eventually pay off, the experience I had from organizing a Festival of this scale was invaluable. I learned that getting involved is always worth it, you may not know the impact you could have on a community. The dream of a festival started as a pipe dream, but as the year went on we found more ways to make our larger festival a dream come true.
Before kickoff, hosts got first dibs on the press wall
I am thankful to the GCSEN Foundation because now I can look back to some of my experiences as a student, Social Entrepreneur, and professional and see them as Wow lessons and reminders! The experiences I’ve had with GCSEN have caused me to go back and evaluate the social impact the festival began and not just the fun I had while making it happen. I share this story in hopes that you will also be inspired to Get to Wow! either now or later. There is enough time for everything and if you believe in yourself, then you can do anything.
With gratitude,
Winslow Robinson, GCSEN Alumni 2019 graduate
GCSEN Foundation - Operations Junior Consultant