PTA Film Night

[littlesthobo]

Our primary school PTA is organising a Film Night in February, which we're woefully underprepared for (Christmas Bazaar or some other nonsense taking up every waking moment...) Has anyone had a similar event? Where did you hire equipment from? Tell me about public performance licences! We're in north London. All help gratefully received.

Hi,

We hold a film night every half term normally.
You will need a license from this company www.themplc.co.uk/page/about-the-umbrella-licence

It's not too expensive and covers you for the entire year.
Ours renews automatically each year and we get sent the invoice.

We screen ours in the hall so we are limited to how many we can fit in for safety reasons. For this reason we sell tickets on our PTA events website so that we can then generate class lists so that we and the teachers know who is meant to be going where and ensure that parents can list any dietary requirements their child has and it flags this up on their information. Before we had PTA events we collected the money from the class teachers a few days before and then crossed the kids off the class lists and then passed these names back to the teachers who would advise of any dietary issues. Bit more annoying and time consuming but still doable.

Not sure what equipment you need to hire? We use the schools projector and screens which are already in the hall. We normally use a film that one of us has or if showing a new release we buy it.

Food - we serve hotdogs and a drink and the kids can pick popcorn or a packet of crisps. Our PTA bought a popcorn maker (one of those big ones that you can wheel around) a few years ago so we use that but before that we just used the microwavable ones.

The hardest part is getting bloody volunteers to stay and help serve the food and do supervise toilet runs for the younger kids.

We are hoping to do one for adults soon but are all exhausted after the christmas fair and have already started planing for our next summer festival.

Our school set up a number of screens in the KS2 classes and the hall, the kids can then choose one of 4 films. They managed to get hotdogs from one tesco, buns from another, fruit shoots from sainsburys and popcorn from the cinema. They got the same licence as above

Thank you - this is all really helpful. We're doing an adult only- night for starters, so having a lot of fun coming up with film choices! But if there's lots of demand from children, we'll roll out a programme of film nights - how exciting, thanks again!

and tell me about post-Christmas fair exhaustion - still having anxiety dreams about reindeer and straw bales...

Let me know how it goes! We are always trying to engage more parents and are looking at an film night or quiz night for adults (with booze obviously) in the new year.

Littlehobo - Sorry to resurrect this thread but the information that Pengweng has given you is incorrect. if you are showing a film and are charging for tickets then you need a licence per film. If you are showing a film under an umbrella licence and charging then you are breaking the law. It very clearly states in the FAQ that that "the MPLC Umbrella Licence® covers only those situations where admission is not charged." So if you are charging for tickets you do need a single use licence.

I hope the film showing goes well. Our PTA does these and we have popcorn and juice included in the tickets - the children love it.