Flickers on the Wall: Getting Your Film into a Festival, Part 1 – The Film

I’m back here at The Fix from my Dragon*Con-instigated hiatus.  Each year I see more short films than I can count as the director of the Dragon*Con Independent Short Film Festival.  They come in, sometimes in boxes of 60, and I dutifully watch each from beginning to end.  With popcorn and candy in hand and a coke nearby, I gleefully enter cinematic worlds, and after hours, or sometimes only minutes, I speculate on the effects of shoving my remaining popcorn into my eyes as well as using my now mushy chocolate to seal my ears for all time.  Oh the humanity! 

Every season, I find truly artistic shorts that are thoughtful, beautiful, funny, moving, and inspiring.  To find those, I must plunge into a cesspool of incompetence and retarded development.  It’s not pretty. This isn’t just the nature of short films.  A majority of features are painfully lacking in imagination and talent, creations that cause loving mothers to take off for prolonged holidays in Spain in order to avoid telling their children that they are failures in every way.  It’s the nature of art: to sit atop a mountain of refuse.  A majority of literature is not worth reading, or printing, or even acknowledging.  Most paintings are a waste of canvas better used as dusting cloths.  As for music, one can only wish that the ability to hum, much less compose notes, would be stripped from most of the human race.

Thankfully, you are more than likely spared from imbibing a majority of the drivel.  Slush readers and magazine editors save you from umpteen thousand primitive word-stews on a weekly basis.  That’s not the case for me with short films.  I have no filters.  That job falls to me, and it is a time consuming one (note the hiatus).  Yes, it is extremely rewarding when I find an entertaining, intelligent, and emotional work, but it takes a lot of sifting.

So let’s see if I can make it easier on myself and on the filmmakers and potential filmmakers reading this column. You (that is, you the filmmaker) want to get your work into a festival.  That’s quite reasonable since outside of free Internet streaming (where you are lumped in with Man Get’s Hit in the Groin With Football), there aren’t a lot of options for getting your movie in front of the public. The festival route isn’t easy and can be expensive, and to many, it seems like a crap shoot. At least the last isn’t true.  There are rules and tricks and pathways through the jungle. I’ve learned them not only from running the D*CIS film festival, but as a judge and “slush viewer” for other fests.  I’ve also discussed the nature of the business with over a hundred festival directors, from those who run the largest red carpet affairs to the haggard one-man-bands of tiny genre events. We all sing the same tune.  

There are two areas to cover: 1. The film itself and 2. How you submit it.  Today, I’ll tackle the first. Next month, I’ll discuss submitting to festivals.

Know Your Audience
You need to be thinking about getting accepted into festivals during the planning stages.  Why?  Because that gets you thinking about how your audience will react.  The selection committees are your first audiences.  Of course, the solution to all your problems is simple: make a brilliant movie.  But that’s a little hard to define.  I can tell you to be artistic and talented, but those are out of my control, and since you are being judged by people who may have very different sensibilities, those are partially out of your control, too. So I’ll assume that your movie will be filled with heart and deep philosophical insight (or a lot of blood).  You just need to get by all those other films filled with heart and deep philosophical insight (or blood…did I mention the blood?).

Length: Short is Sweet
The number one consideration is length.  More than stars, social relevance, or amount of skin you can get on-screen, length will determine if your film gets screened; the shorter the better.  No film can be too brief.  Twenty minutes is OK.  Twelve minutes is better, and five minutes is the Holy Grail.  Does your artistic vision require 40 minutes?  Get a new vision.  If you have only the one, find a new occupation.

A festival only has a limited amount of space.  All the films have to fit into preset time slots.  It’s easy to fit in a five-minute film; it will go anywhere.  But it can be a mad jigsaw puzzle trying to fit in several 30-minute flicks.  Not only is the fit tricky, but your film has to earn its spot.  A five-minute film must beat out the other five-minute films, but a 40-minute one must be better then all the other 40-minute films, and all the films whose running times add up to it.  Those 40 minutes of festival time could hold three ten-minute films and two five-minute ones, and if any film of those lengths is judged to be better than yours, then that’s the way it will go. A festival director is taking a chance with every film.  If the audience doesn’t like it, and it’s long, they aren’t going to like it for a very long time.  But if they hate a three-minute short-short, the discomfort is over before anyone has time to abandon the theater.

Short is good for another reason: Chances are your film will be improved with unrestrained editing.  Filmmakers are known for treating their creations as their babies, to be held and coddled.  They put so much work into taking those shots that it’s hard to give up any.  But the audience won’t care how much effort you put in, or how that was the shooting night with that perfect moon and when the dog finally hit its mark.  Most 40-minute films I see would play much better at 20, 20-minute ones would play better at 12, and 12 at five.  If a shot isn’t needed to tell the story, it should go.

The Credits: Very Short is Very Sweet
Short is sweet, particularly when it pertains to credits, another area that can make or break a film.  No one, except the people who worked on a film, likes watching credits.  No one.  Nobody is reading who the electrician or caterer is.  Credits are a great dead space in your film.  Modern features can get away with gobs of unwanted information scrolling forever because the lights have gone up and people can walk out.  Shorts are shown in blocks, and no festival director wants his audience walking out in the middle. As a struggling filmmaker with no spare change, there’s a good chance your options are limited; you may have traded an on-screen credit to the local pizzeria for lunch.  Fine, but keep it on-screen for only as long as your contract requires.  If a credit isn’t there because of a deal that you made, pull it.  As for you, you have no deal with yourself, so don’t stick your name in ad nauseam—Director: Bob Glob  (pause)  Producer: Bob Glob  (pause)  Associate Producer: Bob Glob  (pause)  Costume designer: Bob Glob… If you must list your multiple hats, do it all at once, and make it scroll fast.

As for pre-title credits, don’t have any.  I know of festival directors who will pull a film from their machines and pitch it the moment they see pre-title text.  The name of your film is the only thing anyone watching wants to see first.  And keep in mind, you are not Hitchcock.  “A Max Ziglumphy Film” just makes you look pompous.  Woody Allen can stick “A film by…” on the front of his movies because people are coming to see it, at least in part, because it’s by Woody Allen.  It still looks pompous, but he can get away with it.  However, no one is coming to see your movie because it’s “A film by you”‐except maybe your mother.

The Celebrity Impact, or Lack Thereof
Do stars count?  Should you spend a substantial portion of your budget on a minor actor who will be recognized?  Yes and no.  A name counts, even a lesser one.  There’s a reason why those questionable Sci-Fi Channel movies are filled with a bunch of people you’ve never heard of and one cut-rate star. All things being equal, a name actor will win you the day, but that’s only if all things are equal.  Stars are good, but not the first place to spend on cast and crew.  Instead, acquire a top-notch sound man.  Poor sound will disqualify your film from anything but your neighbor’s garage.  Next, pick up an experienced cinematographer and a separate lighting team when possible.  Then budget for set designers, builders, and scouts, and a few actors with talent.  If, after that, you’ve got a few bucks left over for last decade’s TV star or Daniel Baldwin, go for it.

Film versus Digital Video?
Five years ago, the most common question I got asked was: Is film worth the cost? Should I shoot on film or digital video?  Time has answered that one; digital video won.  It’s massively cheaper, and with good lighting, 90% of your audience won’t be able to tell film stock never entered your camera.  For the finance-impaired, there is no question.  But if you are that lucky millionaire, and you’ve already gotten the best crew money can buy (remember: sound and lighting), then if you can use 35mm, do so.  It does make a difference.  Not much of one anymore, perhaps, but if you have the funds, it’s one more point for you.

The Screenplay
Everything I’ve laid out so far should be easy.  Getting the right screenplay isn’t.  Courses are taught on screenplay writing, and most scripts are still abysmal. I can’t change that.  Nor can I explain how to choose one with artistry in every line of dialog.  All I can do is help you narrow your focus. 

A short film isn’t like a feature and certainly isn’t like a novel.  There’s no time for multiple ideas and no time for character development.  A short film has one idea.  That’s it.  Find a script that delves into a single concept.  If it tries to do too much, your finished project will be cluttered and undoubtedly too long.  Many filmmakers attempt to make a micro version of their dream feature.  The results are ugly.  Could anyone write a 20-page version of War and Peace?  How about a 30-page Moby-Dick?  So why is a 15-minute take on Casablanca any better?  Short films are their own art form.  Choose a story that needs to be told in under an hour. 

Intermission
Okay, so: Make it short, make your credits shorter, make sure your sound and lighting are professionally produced, find a story that should be told in the short film format, and spend on name actors and film stock only if you have cash to burn.  That’s a start.  Next time, I’ll dig in to how you should communicate with festivals to give your film the best chance.