In 2020 students in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences had an abundance of real-time case studies in crisis communication. The ways in which we communicate when times are difficult are crucial to how we maintain hope, and students were able to get more than a glimpse of that in the past year.

Leticia Cherchiglia, Ph.D., leads a course where students assist the East Lansing Film Festival with its communication needs. Students strategize and create content for the festival’s social media accounts, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. The partnership has helped students gain experience in digital media management and provides an outlet for their creativity while learning about the East Lansing Film Festival and the arts community beyond campus.

COVID-19 restrictions were incredibly difficult for the cinema, with all movie theaters in the state shut down for months. With no open screens, the East Lansing Film Festival had to be delayed. This created a challenge for Dr. Cherchiglia’s course, but not one without opportunities of its own.

With no festival dates or films to promote, students had to find ways to get creative with their content. At the same time, they needed to create the typical promotional content to promote the festival for when it would eventually be rescheduled, with placeholders for the dates and film titles.

“Students were overcoming those challenges and thinking outside the box,” Cherchiglia said. “Our students got really creative and that is something that is very rewarding.”

Students came up with resource guides for streaming independent films at home, and kept content engaging with posts such as a March Madness-style bracket to determine the best film ever made. They were also able to gain more of a window into the history of the East Lansing Film Festival by creating a video interview with ELFF Director Susan Woods.

These difficult times reveal the importance of art, and Social Media and Social Computing (MI 462) students were able to help uplift an art festival for the community.