Austin hosting the Raindance Closing Awards Ceremony

Author: Austin Hughes | Major: Studio Art | Semester: Summer 2025

This summer, I interned at Raindance Film Festival in London — and despite going in relatively blind, left with an invaluable level of experience in film and large number of incredible mentors and friends. I started with Raindance in mid-May to help with duties leading up to the festival, which would last ten days at the end of June. It was a small, tight-knit team operating London’s largest independent film festival

At first, I was assigned the job of Jury Coordinator, which required inviting, communicating with, and hosting industry and talent professionals in order to decide award winners. Not only did this involve distributing unreleased films to a list of jurors and organizing their votes, but it meant maintaining positive relationships with our most esteemed guests for the festival — a job which ended up being the most rewarding to me.

After a week or two of jury coordination, the festival team decided to also promote me to Box Office Manager, a more logistics-based paid role on top of my jury duties that required me to fully understand our ticketing software to help filmmakers and festival attendees alike get tickets, comps, or accommodations.

In the meantime, the founder of the festival, Elliot Grove, trusted me to write blog posts for the festival’s website to advertise our program. Thus, my typical day consisted of emailing jurors, maintaining the box office website, writing blog posts, and — when things were quiet — watching our movies.

By the time the festival officially started towards the end of June, I had plenty on my plate. Quite honestly, one of the biggest things I learned about the film industry is just how unorganized it is, for better and for worse. Those first few days of the festival created some of the most intense pressure I’ve ever experienced. Big responsibility is a double-edged sword; I was fulfilled with such important tasks, but those tasks completely relied on my own competence. There were very difficult moments for me in those first few days, ones where I was close to buckling under that pressure. These are the moments, though, that I’m most thankful for. The film industry (or at least the more “independent” side involved with the festival) is disorganized, but it’s also very supportive. I found an incredible support system in the other festival workers as well as the filmmakers themselves. Film is a very passionate world, and I made really incredible friends amidst the intensity.

I was also trusted with several more public jobs, including moderating Q&As for premiere screenings. This required me to watch a film and do research on its creation, then prepare questions for a panel of filmmakers to host right after its premiere. This was one of the most exciting jobs for me, as it was much more face-to-face. After success with this task, I was also asked last minute to host the final day Awards Ceremony. I might have just been too exhausted at that point to be nervous, but that was my favorite part of the entire festival. It was incredibly rewarding and fulfilling to stand up in front of an entire room of all my jurors, coworkers, and filmmakers to introduce and represent them. I remember afterwards, two of the jurors — industry professionals with their own impressively long lists of accomplishments — came up to me after they announced their respective awards to ask, “Did we do alright?!” I laughed, saying, “You’re asking me if you did alright?”.

My goal since starting college has been to build a portfolio for animation or illustration, but I’m attracted to the entertainment industry as a whole. While I love Arkansas, there’s not many resources for that sort of thing here, which has made many aspects of my education feel like an uphill battle. Thus, going into this summer, I made sure to be very receptive to being in a place that did have said industry, and it truly made all the difference.

I never thought I’d get another degree after graduation, but after several post-festival coffees and brunches with some of my jurors and coworkers, I’ve been convinced to try for a Master’s degree in Film Production over there in London. For my Honors Thesis, I’ve planned for years to make an animated short film, and I’m not only extra inspired after seeing so many indie films and shorts this summer, but extra motivated by the fact that my Thesis will influence those Masters applications.

Ultimately, I was pretty lost and uninspired my past few years of undergrad, but I’ve come home for my senior year at UARK with renewed passion and direction as well as a much clearer picture of want I want for myself going forward.