Film festivals, worth it for a short?

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egyptianboxer104

Well-known member
Tomorrow i'm shooting the second to last scenes of my short. my final scene is going to be the weekend after next... which will be edited day it is shot.

Anyway, I was now thinking about film festivals... I'm shooting this on a HVX... and I was considering sending it into film festivals but I hear it can get a bit expensive. I want to turn this short into a feature film but I of course don't have the money yet... Would it be worth sending it to film festivals?
 
Experience is always worth it.
You'll enjoy it, if nothing else. If you are selective about which festivals you submit to, travel is your biggest expense.
If doing it for invenstment, your belief int he project will dictate that. If doing it to enjoy, do it and enjoy. You gain enspiration, some contacts, ect.
 
I would only enter ones that you think you will be selected at, so unless you got a really badass short I wouldn't go sundance. Festivals get expensive and often if they are kinda regional you may not get selected because you are not from there. I have entered a couple free ones that are in the midwest, but I haven't been selected because they most often accept local entries first. That's what the email said.
 
egyptianboxer104 said:
Tomorrow i'm shooting the second to last scenes of my short. my final scene is going to be the weekend after next... which will be edited day it is shot.

Anyway, I was now thinking about film festivals... I'm shooting this on a HVX... and I was considering sending it into film festivals but I hear it can get a bit expensive. I want to turn this short into a feature film but I of course don't have the money yet... Would it be worth sending it to film festivals?
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they are a lot of work. a full time gig, really, if you do it right. if you're suspect about what you'd get out of it, i wouldn't do it. the benefits of playing on the festival circuit aren't simply handed to you. you have to define and pursue exactly what you want. being accepted just means you have been given an opportunity to put your gameplan into motion, whatever that plan might be.

whether something is "expensive" is relative. i have a short that just began popping up at festivals. so far i've spent $1200 on submission fees, a couple hundred on posters and postcards, more on a web site. right now i'm putting together content for the DVD so I can self-distribute. don't forget plane tickets, hotels rooms, etc.
 
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I see.. your advice was actually really helpful in deciding what i want to do... This summer I don't have the time or the money (being a college student) to hit the "film festival circuit" hardcore like you have. I think I will have a showing of it on my college campus and then see peoples opinions to figure out if it's worth doing.

But my goal is to find investors to invest in a feature version of my short. is going to film fests helpful in that aspect?
 
egyptianboxer104 said:
I see.. your advice was actually really helpful in deciding what i want to do... This summer I don't have the time or the money (being a college student) to hit the "film festival circuit" hardcore like you have. I think I will have a showing of it on my college campus and then see peoples opinions to figure out if it's worth doing.

But my goal is to find investors to invest in a feature version of my short. is going to film fests helpful in that aspect?
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it can be. what you might really want to look into are "film markets". Cannes has one called "Short FIlm Corner". the CFC Worldwide Shorts festival in Toronto has one too that's coming up soon. a regular festival can be helpful in terms of finding investors if you can win some audience awards. that's what distributor and financiers (who know what theyre doing) look for. they don't care about jury awards because of the well known trend of juries to give their award to the film that most needs their help. the audience award is where it's at as far as the money people are concerned.
 
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Zak is spot on. Allow me to add to this.

I finished a 14 minute short entitled Saturday Night Special. We spent close to $2,000.00 submitting it to 50 festivals. We got into 8. Of the 8 only 4 had awards. We were nominated at 3 of them and won at 2.

Twain said there are lies, damn lies and then there are statistics. That is certainly true when it comes to analyzing the value of film festivals.

Was it worth spending $1,000.00 to win an award? That's what each award cost me...$1,000.00. Another way to see it is cost me $250.00 per festival I was screened at. Yet another way to analyze it is that I won 75% of the awards I was nominated for. That sounds really good! Even better, two of the festival directors wrote glowing reviews of my movie. They also revealed their ratio of submissions versus accepted films. The Santa Fe Film Festival has an 11% acceptance rate. Statistic like that impress investors.

After pushing Saturday Night Special for 6 months, here is what I really learned:

1.) Film festivals cost a fortune. There are numerous hidden fees. Expect to spend thousands if you are serious about pursuing festivals.
2.) The selection process is largely arbitrary. Now that I know two festival directors I've gotten to hear their views on the selection process. And they both admit the process is terribly unfair. Many festivals don't look at any of the submissions...submissions exist to generate revenue for the festival. Many festival directors simply collect the submission fees and then call up another festival director for recommendations. Entire schedules are built out of soliciting the winners of other film festivals.
3.) The #1 thing that hurt my movie was it's length. At 14 minutes it was way too long. This isn't a pacing/editing issue. This is a scheduling issue. Festivals want shorts less than 10 minutes in length because they're easier to program. A crappy 9 minute movie has a greater chance of getting into a film festival than an excellent 22 minute film.
4.) Despite this, the moment I won my first film festival I was able to secure $90,000.00....which quickly led to $30,000.00 more...which lead to $40,000.00 more. So, spending $2,000.00 on film festivals was an investment that lead to my $160,000.00 feature film. In that context, despite the corrupt, exploitative nature of the film festival process, it was worth it.
5.) For the rest of my life my resume will now read "Award winning filmmaker." And since investors don't know how to evaluate a project by it's own merit they need third-party confirmation regarding my skills. Now they have it. For the rest of my life it is going to be easier to raise money for movies.

However, these lessons will only apply if you make a damn good film. I've seen delusional filmmakers who shoot a three-minute zombie movie with no plot, crappy FX, terrible acting, awful lighting, non-existent sound-design and cheesy music submit to tons of festivals...only to be rejected 100% of the time. Often, they become bitter and deflect responsibility onto the festival. "It was rigged! It wasn't fair!" Well, no **** Shirlock...but you didn't help yourself by submitting a piece of crap, now did you?
 
LOL, nice post Prodigi. That's quite a story about raising money...

I think festivals are kind of funny, given I have little experience so far I'm willing to pay the money to figure it all out for myself, with basically no expectations. I mean, I really don't even care that much, do I want to win some awards? Well, sure. But I don't need the money, for one, and two, I don't really care about other prizes as much as I just want some additional validation that the work I'm doing is high quality and appreciated. Plus when you submit a music video to festivals, what are you really expecting? If you're expecting anything more than a fun time at a few festivals and maybe some selections, nominations, an award or two, etc., then you're expecting way too much.

But about the length of a short film, I agree. My goal is to make a very high quality 9 minute short film, well at least under 10 minutes, sometime either late this year or early 2009, just because I have no short films I'm proud of at all. They were all amateur hour, and rightfully so, I used amateurs and I was an amateur, haha. So my music video work is professional, and now I have some great professional corporate work, I'd just like to have a nice short film and get some experience / awards before I shoot my first feature. Since I intend to finance my feature entirely myself, I don't really care about raising money for it, but as for distribution I don't think it would hurt if I did a short film that won a number of awards before I did the feature.

The issue there is I wonder if it wouldn't be effective to do a short in the same genre (horror) as my feature, except that I really don't want to be a horror film director, haha, I just happen to have one I want to shoot and I'd much rather make a drama for my short. I just can't start with a drama for a feature as it's not marketable or profitable. Hmm... decisions.
 
What do you seek to accomplish by putting your film into a shorts section?

I think there are only two positive things that you can pick up by putting your film into a festival :

1) Networking opportunities aka finding an agent, manger, producer, heck...even a kick ass DP who worked in a previous film. I'll throw in prizes, although sometimes I've found that getting a cash prize is worse than not getting one (i've had actresses and actors hound me down for money they heard I had received for a short film - the funny thing was that we weren't given that money for a year and a half)...but submitting for prizes is usually a bad idea.

2) Exposure - aka, does it put your film and your name into a hundred extra blogs/webpages/articles/myspace adds/ etc?

Maybe you made a short film and are from a smaller city and want it to be screened on a big screen by friends and family, which is fine. But there are a good amount of film festivals that are more focused on bringing in money for their own Chamber of Commerce than to help expose and connect the future filmmakers of the world.
 
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