Hi there, this is Jonathan Ziegler and I’m asking for your vote. I’m running for President of IFASA for 2013. I’ve been involved in many ways with numerous independent film projects over the last few years, including having served as Member-at-Large and Vice President of IFASA. I run the Arizona Media Professionals groups on LinkedIn and Facebook and I have my own business where I work on video, photo, web, and design projects of all kinds. I’ve also provided assistance and expertise whenever possible at IFASA’s meetings, including my short series of DIY equipment builds.
I love the passion, talent, and creativity of Tucson’s film community. It is this passion I’m staking IFASA’s future on. That future is you: Tucson’s film community.
Moving forward, I would like to see IFASA and it’s passionate film community strive forward. I want to improve upon the IFASA website by adding tools that improve functions and features while also adding to its usefulness. I intend to make a tool all filmmakers can use to begin, work on, and improve their projects.
IFASA’s website should be the first place filmmakers go when creating a new project. With the myriad of useful, often free, tools around the web now, from screenwriting to project planning to storyboarding to editing and even funding, there is no reason we can’t make something we can all access, making the site a valued resource, developing our community into a solid resource of experts from all areas and disciplines and all experience levels.
I plan to increase IFASA awareness outside of the film community. Every Tucsonan should know about IFASA and what film, video, the web, and, more importantly, IFASA’s members, can offer to the community, its groups, organizations, businesses, and each other. We have made many attempts with great success, but they fade over time and now its time to redouble our efforts to improve our visibility. As President, I will personally introduce myself to numerous persons and business owners in Tucson – large and small and I’ll encourage all of you to invite at least one person or group to attend one of our free, public meetings. To increase awareness, we’re going to encourage more and more IFASA members to post their projects so we can feature them on our website, improve awareness, and provide broader distribution. Along these lines, I would like to also increase our scope to places like Facebook, Twitter, Meetup, LinkedIn, etc. and improve our existing email and membership systems.
This leads to the last part: increasing our membership and revenues. We are a 501(c)3 non-profit business. We must operate on donations, services, and sales to continue operating. I have always dreamed of having our own office with a real staff and a place to always have a meeting, gather resources, check out books, or just talk with an expert, with a projector and sound system and room large enough to have a city hall meeting or shoot a movie. This kind of goal requires planning, time, patience, and money. I propose that we enact the new $25 membership fee immediately. Existing members will still be able to renew at the old rate of $10 until later in the year.
I encourage your input, questions, feedback, and critique. Please feel free to email me directly at electrictigerdesign@gmail.com. I’m also free to meet with you personally either at the upcoming IFASA Mixer at Gentle Ben’s or any other time. You may contact me on my cell at 520-360-8293 – please leave a message if I can’t answer right away.
Thank you for your time and I look forward to seeing you all soon.
-Jonathan Ziegler