Submitting to festivals - authoring.

G

Goran

New member
Hey, guys.

Are there requirements about authoring the DVD when submitting to festivals, that is, should it just play straight away or should I make a "Play" option?

Any other things to keep in mind to make the output "festival-ready"?

Thanks in advance.
 
Auto play. In fact, if you could devise a way to also "automatically" remove the DVD from the envelope and put it into the player, they would appreciate that, as well.
 
troof.
Nobody likes to dink through menus with a stack of DVDs to sift though. This goes for your demo reel as well. Have pitty on the viewer.
 
I just read the book, "Film Festival Secrets," and was really impressed by the quality and volume of content in there. Very thorough and solid advice. And yes, this book also says that it's better to have an auto-play DVD or at the most a very simple menu that is easy to play your film.

Check out the book here (I'm not affiliated in any way--I just liked it): http://tinyurl.com/ffsamz


...
 
When I send anything for someone to make a decision on. I want it to be as easy as possible.
So I'm with the rest of the gang AUTO play.
By the way Sean DOPPELGANGER looks great makes you look for another episode.
 
The thing that stopped me from making my dvds autoplay for festivals is thinking about the 10-60 seconds or more between pushing the 'close' button on the DVD player and being ready to actually watch.

The person puts the dvd in, closes the drawer on the dvd player, turns back to face the other other jurors and says:

"Okay, so after this let's get lunch, okay?"
"Sure"
"Sounds great"
"Awesome. So which movie is this again?"
"I don't know, let me get my check list"
"Oh crap. Hey, it's already rolling. We missed the intro"
"Is there any sound? Where's the remote? Turn it up"
"Oh yeah, we muted it on that last film's credits with that horribly mixed garage band playing"
"Okay, there we go. Un-mute"
"Should we start it over?"
"Nah. We'll be able to figure it out without having seen the first minute"
"Okay"
"So what was the title?"
"Let's see... oh, it's called "The Greatest 2 minute movie in the world"".
"Sounds good, okay, let's see what we have here... hey... is that it? It's over."
"Hmmm, how about that"
"Do you think we should program it in our short-shorts category?"
"Nah, it didn't look that great anyway. Let's go get lunch"
 
I've read quite a few posts at WAB and elsewhere from festival programmers and screeners who complain about autoplay because it doesn't give them a chance to settle into their seat. and that more often than not they either start it over or resign to having missed the opening -- both of which go against the philosophy of low resistance. I would do a simple, single-screen menu.
 
Wow. Thanks for that validation, Zak. I'd never actually heard anybody say that but it has always been a concern of mine. :thumbup:
 
Zak Forsman said:
I've read quite a few posts at WAB and elsewhere from festival programmers and screeners who complain about autoplay because it doesn't give them a chance to settle into their seat. and that more often than not they either start it over or resign to having missed the opening -- both of which go against the philosophy of low resistance. I would do a simple, single-screen menu.
Click to expand...

Zak has the experience, posts on WAB, and knows what he's talking about.

This is good advice. I make a VERY simple menu, it at most has a nice little design with "PLAY MOVIE" and "PLAY TRAILER" so as to be really obvious, or just "PLAY MOVIE" and "BIO." I figure that I'm making the DVD for more than JUST festivals, so I would like to have the trailer on there for a short or a little bio on there if it doesn't have a trailer. But it is very simple, no frills, that is annoying to festival programmers. They have too many things to look at. It should be really obvious to hit play...

And also, two festivals so far out of the maybe 40 I've heard from have requested that for their program, I send them auto-play DVDs, but they ask everyone to do that anyway, they scratch up the screeners basically.
 
Texanite said:
:huh: a "don't play" button? Does it blow up the DVD player as revenge if they click it? :D
Click to expand...

I added the "don't play" button 'cause some people got confused when there was only a "play" button. I guess they got momentarily confused and/or thought their DVD player wasn't working right because when they hit the up/down/left/right buttons nothing happened since there was only a single button. So I added the dummy "don't play" button as a bit of a joke a couple of years ago.


-A
 
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