Backstory

The All-American High School Film Festival (hereafter, A-AHSFF) is a week-long event hosted in New York City. Students can submit their short films in advance, and at the event are exhibitions and rewards for the best-judged films. There is also a tech fair, this year on the 22nd of October. KDE community member Nataniel Farzan is one of this year’s selected entrants, and negotiated a booth for KDE at the tech fair!

There aren’t very many members in the KDE community in the US, but a few of us live in the area. Philip Cohn-Cort and I heeded the call (with the invaluable remote support of Paul Brown and Aniqa Khokhar).

Paul and Aniqa did most of the heavy lifting of preparing the event for success. They requested the budget, and ordered the stickers, tablecloth, and banner. Big thank you to both of you! All Philip and I did was prepare the computers and, of course, show up.

Arrival

For me, the trip is about an hour and a half by train. Since the event started early on Saturday and we needed to set up, my best option was to leave Friday and spent the night. Philip similarly has a bit of a journey into the city. Since the banner was running late, he stayed later at his place in the hope it might arrive.

I got to the hotel first and checked in. A cute and efficient way to spend a night! The wifi was useless so it’s a good thing everything was already downloaded.

Festival

Booth Setup

Philip and I arrived in plenty of time, an hour before the festival started. This turned out to be good, because the venue had an extreme shortage of power outlets and none close to our booth! There was only one outlet on the whole area. I had a long extension cord, but not long enough to run all the way across the room. Happily, we didn’t need much power to run three laptops, so the people setting up the booth in front of the outlet let us plug into their power strip.

With that out of the way, we plugged my power strip into the extension cord, covered the extension cord with mats also kindly offered by the Fotocare booth to prevent a tripping hazard, and got everything set up.

In order from left to right, Philip’s older Surface Book running KDE Neon, Appimage kdenlive, and Krita. My new laptop running Windows with kdenlive. And my old touchscreen laptop running Fedora, krita, and kdenlive.

Krita turned out to be a great addition to the demo. Students loved doodling with the pen touchscreens, and several attendees were interested in it for the ability to do animation.

Power strip might be an American English word? For those not familiar, here is a picture.

Student Engagement

Going into the festival, one key note from Paul kept ringing in my head:

At places like FOSDEM or Scale, KDE is relatively well-known… This is not the case for A-AHSFF. At A-AHSFF, booth staff will have to be pro-active and engage attendees as they pass.

This turned out to be completely true. I spoke with exactly one person (a student) who knew what kdenlive was. So I needed a pro-active strategy.

Across from our booth, the huge lights of the Fotocare booth could not be missed. So I used this to our advantage. As groups or individual students came to admire the lights, I would intercept them and ask simply, “Can I give you a sticker?”

After all, who doesn’t want a sticker? I gave away a lot of stickers this way.

Most visitors would say “Yes”, after which point I had their attention and could present my quick pitch. “This is for kdenlive, free video editing software written by volunteers.”

Student Reception

To be honest, I am surprised at how well my short pitch worked. Some (say, 15%) students were just not interested, and responded with some form of “Ok, thanks for the sticker” and wander off.

But most were at least intrigued, at which point I would launch into my second phase: “It’s totally free, it runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and it supports Adobe file formats. It’s running on these laptops, please feel free to have a seat and try it out.”

(The second phrase evolved a lot over the course of the day, trying to head off the questions I had already received, like “What do you mean, free? Is there a subscription?” and “Are you a startup?”)

Nearly every attendee who heard this part of my pitch would look at the laptops and examine them for a few seconds, maybe prod the computer, and most (say, 80%) would leave with some form of “Cool! I’ll check it out.” I imagine by the time their long day is over, most students will have forgotten. But hopefully a few will find their stickers tomorrow, and remember to install it.

Finally, there was the rarer group of students who would actually sit down, and were really interested. This only happened 5 or 10 times through the event, but those students were really engaged. I’m pretty confident they’ll look for their sticker tomorrow and install kdenlive.

Educator Engagement

At the same time as we were trying to engage students, I was trying to pick out and engage adults who were not just parents wandering around after their darting children, but educators interested in putting kdenlive in their classroom. Before the event got fully under way, I started an online form to collect data from interested educators. This form also evolved over the course of the event, but I intentionally kept it short and simple. Just an email entry, a few checkboxes, and a field for “anything else” (largely for our usage, so we could keep notes about them!)

We chatted with quite a few educators and everyone I chatted with put their information into my form. The overwhelming response was “Wow, this is so cool, I can send this home with my students so they can work when their school laptop (and thus, Adobe subscription) isn’t available.” I remember one educator who primarily worked for a large, wealthy university, but in the summers taught at a poorer school where he was excited to bring kdenlive. Another educator said his school district paid for Adobe subscriptions, but that would end as soon as his students graduated, and he was excited to be able to offer them kdenlive as a replacement.

Postmortem

Overall, I am very happy with how the festival turned out. We reached lots of excited students, I suspect many of them will try kdenlive in the near future. Moreover, we reached many excited educators, who thought kdenlive would fit in their classroom in one way or another.

At the start of the event, I commented that I wished the stickers had a QR code. Since our banner hadn’t arrived, we only had the smaller QR codes on pieces of paper on the table, and I doubt my shouts of “kdenlive.org” have stuck in any memories. I usually scan QR codes of things I am interested in during a busy event. That way, the browser tabs act as automatic reminders, long after I’ve forgotten the sticker in the bottom of my bag. However, I think our stickers did an appropriate job of allowing me to start conversations, as well as let students who were really excited remember what it was they were excited about. We had intended to pair it with a big banner with a QR code, which would have filled that hole. Several of the most excited students scanned the printed QR codes we had on the table.

With the relative sudden appearance of the event, the banner was unfortunately not able to arrive in time. I am mostly cross because that means that we now have a banner that we will not be using! However, with the laptops, tablecloth, and stickers, I think our booth was snazzy, and we were able to get plenty of attention.