Jesse Baritz, Director, Content Acquisition and Development, for Los Angeles-based Multicom Entertainment Group, sent VideoAge‘s Water Cooler a first-hand report about his experience at the virtual American Film Market (AFM) event, held November 9-13, 2020.

“AFM went pretty smoothly for me,” began Baritz (pictured above). “And I was quite busy. My schedule was packed with new filmmakers, sales agents, and distributors to network with and consider for deals and partnerships.”

He continued: “I attended a couple of panels, but I felt the panel-viewing system was very confusing to navigate, especially if joining after the start of the event.”

As for the scheduling portal system, Baritz noted that it “was pretty useful for me, but I found it to be a cumbersome process to go back and forth to various pages in the process of setting up meetings. I liked the direct scheduling tool and the auto-populating Zoom feature, but I found myself bothered by the amount of steps necessary to set even a single meeting.”

He also noted that it “took me until Day Four to figure out I could use other modules from the ‘campus map’ to search through attending companies. For some reason the ‘Company Listings and Scheduling’ tools were so far apart that they actually couldn’t communicate. For example, I was trying to meet with a certain company that I was told was in attendance, but I could not find any of the members of the company using the search function, and there was no indication that the company was in attendance at all.”

He went on to say that “on Thursday [Day Four of the film market], I finally realized there was a module which acted as a listing for companies, regardless of attendees, and was able to reach out to that company to set a meeting for after AFM.”

Baritz also said that he has and “will go back” to the AFM portal. “I’ve gone back to check names and company details of people with whom I met, and I may end up screening some panels I missed.” He then concluded: “Obviously, plenty of work went on outside of AFM, but I was logged into the AFM portal all workday, for the entire week, participating in panels and meeting with content providers and producers. I’d say [I was at the AFM] seven hours a day.”

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