Club Revival - part 5

Newsletters

Film makers are creative people but cannot make a movie in every spare hour.
Members cannot attend every meeting, so they feel they have missed out.
Club evenings devoted to a single topic fascinate some members but inevitably leave others cold.
Club announcements are often forgotten the day after a meeting.
Spreading the word about a club round the community is hard.

The left panel shows part of a page from Border Post the magazine of England's Surrey Border club. It describes and shows scenes from a new production.

A good club newsletter / magazine can help in each case. A publication which contains letters, ideas, comments, reports, announcements and gives a lively feel can do a great deal to re-energize a club. Leave copies in the waiting rooms of doctors, dentists, hairdressers ... anywhere that people pick up a magazine to while away a few minutes and they may be interested.

An electronic version is cheap to produce - and you can always print-out a few for those without web access and for those waiting rooms ...

The only tools required are a camera, scanner and computer. You probably have all the software you might need. Most word-processor programs include templates for booklets and magazines. Otherwise a little experiment with tables (whose borders you make invisible) will help you shape a good-looking newsletter. A simple image editor will help you make the most of the pictures.

For distribution the Adobe pdf format is popular because it displays and prints almost exactly the same way on any computer system. The Adobe writer is expensive but various free options include CutePDF and PDF Creator.

You need pictures of people at the club, so long as they are doing something! Even if it is only eating pizza and chatting to colleagues. By all means show camera and sound teams at work, but don't neglect the costume and prop makers, location scouts and all the other tasks.

You need screen grabs from club movies. Most Apple and PC editing systems allow you to export/save a frame. Some playback tools (including the free VLC Media Player) let you pause a movie and grab a frame. Cassie users will have to ask their PC or Apple friends for help.

The right panel shows just two of the many issues of Panorama the magazine of the SCCA which you can download.

Two of the 'Panorama' magazine covers.

There are lots of good magazines from clubs and associations around the world. Try looking at a few of them:

Society of Canadian Cine Amateurs (visit their website and click on "PANORAMA" for a selection of their excellent issues)
L.A. Cinema Club | Hamilton Video Film Makers | Australian Film & Video | Surrey Border |

Many of these are in pdf format. Most computers have a pdf reader on them. If yours does not, we recommend Foxit pdf reader which is free from www.foxitsoftware.com