Marketing

Franny Armstrong's climate change movie The Age of Stupid had its green carpet premiere at the Vancouver International Film Festival on Tuesday night, with a medley of local luminaries from political, film, and television worlds.

After hearing Peter Dekom's provocative keynote speech at the Vancouver Film and Television Forum (they dropped the word "Trade" from the Forum's title this year, I notice), I missed most of the Film Day and Wednesday's Television themed day. But I was back for the full day of the Storyville panels and events.

Following the Vancouver Film and Television Forum's Storyville morning session, with the introductions to the panel of commissing editors, we had the pitching session in the afternoon. What a contrast to the last pitching session that I saw at the VIFF Trade Forum.

For Peter Dekom, a dry-humoured, Hollywood entertainment lawyer, the single most important factor right now in human development is the speed at which our world is changing.

Dekom, who gave the Vancouver Film and Television Forum keynote talk on Tuesday morning, likes to refer to this "diabolical change" as hyperacceleration.

What a world of difference there is in the way organizations handle problems when they are caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

While usually relatively minor, from a national media standpoint, almost every organization encounters major or minor problems each year as they have “run-ins” with the media. This is especially true today where citizen journalists can blast camphone videos or 140 character Tweets around the globe in the bat of an eye.

I don't know if it was the fact that Vancouver was under a deluge this morning, or there's just fewer journalists around these days, but the Vancouver International Film Festival media conference seemed less busy than in previous years.