Art of Exchange: Lincoln Theater Premiere

Creating a short documentary film takes a lot of work—months of pre-production, production, and post-production, gigabytes of footage, hundreds of hours of editing and graphics time, and dozens of people.

When you're lucky enough to create these amazing short documentaries as part of your day job at Red Hat, that sometimes means you don't get to see it screened in front of a large audience or at a splashy premiere. We finish the film, publish and promote it online, and move on to the next one. It's still an amazing sense of accomplishment, but half of why we all love creating things is the satisfaction of seeing other people enjoy the film and take something away from it.

For our most recent film, Art of Exchange, we got that satisfaction. All of those hours of work culminated in a viewing party at an actual theater, in front of an actual audience of approximately 200 people.

We rented out the Lincoln Theater, which is across the street from our headquarters in Raleigh, NC. We invited all Red Hat associates who were in Raleigh, and as anyone who's organized a large meeting or event knows, free booze and food are guaranteed ways to get at least a few people to show up. So we made sure that we had drinks, popcorn, and candy (to stick with the movie theme). We did a heavy internal promotional push at the Red Hat Tower—digital signs, physical signs, emails, calendar invites, desk drops—the works. Then, we crossed our fingers and hoped people would show up.

The event included a premiere of Art of Exchange, and a Q&A with Leigh Day, our vice president of Marketing Communications, to help our associates learn more about Tate Modern art museum in London, Red Hat's Open Source Stories film series, and what they can do to get involved. To round out the event, we also showed our artificial intelligence documentary on self-driving cars, Road to AI.

[embed]https://youtu.be/TOjA05uLBkw[/embed]

We want to do more of these events, so we're always looking for a new story. If you have an idea for an Open Source Story, send us a note—we'd love to hear from you. To stay up to date, sign up for our newsletter.