This episode I'm joined by Richard Gale, creator of the short film "The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon," which is on its way to becoming a feature film thanks to a healthy festival run and a rabid YouTube fan base. Learn how Gale turned festival success into a cottage industry and a budget for a feature-length horror comedy.
A film by Mark "Coven" Borchardt extolling the virtues of submissions platform FilmFreeway.
Yes.
Earlier this week I posted a minor rant about "sneak peaks" and why they drive me crazy. Imagine my delight to be researching a particular festival, only to discover a stealth mountain on their front page.
Image via MovieMaker.
John Waters, writing for MovieMaker.com. I hadn't planned on linking to this until I saw the very last rule.
Movies people like at film festivals are not always the ones they like in real life.
Ouch.
Ed Fletcher, writing for The Sacramento Bee about the process of making his first short film. The metaphors clash a little bit, but it's a fun read.
Producing a film is a little like putting together a football team for one game. Thankfully, Long, a recent UC Davis graduate, brought his own connections and a team of people who were involved in his earlier projects. In the subsequent weeks, people from his network and mine joined as others dropped out.
The job of the producer is largely to rent the kitchen, buy the ingredients, then get out of the director's way until it's time to sell the soup.
David Weir, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald with tips on how to prepare for the Melbourne International Film Festival:
A haircut is mandatory for tall competitors, to reduce air resistance and avoid friction with spectators seated behind. The final preparation involves a shopping trip and making a two-week supply of sandwiches.
Funny stuff, and not as facetious as you might think. Every festival veteran has a personal set of rituals that makes a marathon event bearable. I really do have a friend who gets what he calls his "festival haircut" a few days before his favorite fest.
This tongue-in-cheek flow chart is one of the cleverer ways I've seen of communicating a film programming ethos. There are plenty of "joke" dead-ends here (I especially like the hackneyed-but-still-funny thrashing of the Comic Sans typeface), but also a serious path through to festival acceptance that reveals the qualities in a film that these programmers want.
The creators of the Lower East Side Film Festival (often shortened, somewhat misleadingly, as LESFilmFest) seem to have done a great job in their inaugural year of creating an identity for their festival. I also see some interesting experiments going on here (like the "QuickSubmit" tool that allows filmmakers with private screening videos on YouTube or Vimeo to bypass the usual submissions process).
I'm looking forward to seeing what they do in 2013.
More from filmmakers Mark Potts & Brand Rackley on how not to do well on the film festival circuit. See also Film Festicles episodes 1 and 2.
Potts' newest feature Cinema Six (co-starring Rackley), just premiered at the Dallas IFF.
New from Film Threat: an entertaining series of videos about the film festival process, written and directed by my friends Mark Potts & Don Swaynos. Above: episode 1, in which a filmmaker wraps his shoot and gets a little bit ahead of himself.
Potts' newest feature Cinema Six will debut in April at the Dallas International Film Festival.
One of the best (and funniest) practical guides to SXSW for newbies I've seen in a long time. David Modigliani is the director of a great film called Crawford and one of the principal creators of Flow Nonfiction.
 | The Better Film Festival Submissions Toolkit has a very simple purpose: to help you improve the way you submit your work to film festivals.
Divided into 7 core tasks with a discussion of each task, the 16-page Toolkit is designed for quick reading and gives you concrete, actionable tasks to make your film submissions package better. Best of all, you'll get the insight you need to better understand what programmers look for and how to submit with confidence. |
