Save your cash on Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW, etc. Target smaller, local festivals or those specific to your genre or film category. Give preference to those festivals that offer feedback. Yes, it’s scary. But, honest and unbiased feedback is worth its weight in gold.
During pre-production, allocate some of your funding for these festival submission fees. It’s a good habit to start implementing marketing earlier in your project. For indie noobs, this means domain registration, social media ads, and the shipping of printed materials, DVDs/BluRays, etc.
Don’t blindly submit to festivals without checking them out. Read their reviews, visit their website (look for missing or out of date information) and if in doubt, ask Twitter or Reddit. There are a few nefarious festivals who are just using online, remote submissions to pay for their local event. Even if your “selected”, they don’t respond nor send you any event information for attendance. It’s an interesting business model.
Make a poster for your short. At a minimum, overlay a title and your domain on top of the best production still you have even if its an exported image from Premiere. There are free resources available to you for “one-sheet” creation.
I also recommend adding a cover letter. To be frank, I have no clue if anyone reads these; however, this is a game of percentages and you’re trying to look more professional than the competition.
Do not upload your video to FilmFreeway. If you do, you are missing out on a ton of analytics. If you need to keep your film private due to Festival requirements, your options are limited to Vimeo Plus ($). Otherwise, you can upload it via YouTube. Both options provide basic analytics. Unlike in the days of mail-in film submissions, you can actually see if they watched your short and for how long given you don’t share the link with others.
Read the rules of the festival BEFORE submitting. Sounds obvious, but I continuously see festivals reminding submitters about this. Some fests have some interesting requirements, such as a mandatory trailer, your film cannot be on social media, specific image sizes and formats for your poster, and DVD/BluRay requirements. Failure to follow their instructions can result in an automatic “incomplete” resulting in a lost fee.
Submit it and forget it. There’s no need to keep checking your inbox or worry about a festival’s response until after the notification date. Expect delays in notifications. In my experience, about 30% fall behind and extend their notification dates. I haven’t seen any correlations either on if a delay helps your chances (i.e., you made the next round) - it’s been 50/50 for me. Ten percent of fests that I have signed up for rather spend energy on updating their website’s fest schedule versus sending out rejection letters. A large majority of fests just use FilmFreeway’s default/generalized reject notification, which does piss me off as it’s indicative of their laziness. There’s a reason FilmFreeway will not let you leave a review to festivals that don’t accept you. Most fests would get negative reviews from submitters who don’t get accepted; however, they should support or incline festivals to leave some sort of film feedback.
Personally, I feel that every festival that charges $20 or more, should provide some reviewer comments. Feedback rarely happens, if at all. The only cases of feedback I have encountered originate from festivals that include it for a fee or are a part of their overall program. Regardless, I have started to politely solicit feedback from rejections. I doubt I’ll receive anything as I rarely receive general email responses from festivals that I am ACCEPTED to. But, I figure they took my cash, so they can earn it by having to delete my email.
One should be prepared for rejection. Each time we wrap up a short, I ultimately get my hopes up. After all, that film is a snapshot that encapsulates the peak of my filmmaking skills for that point in time. If you watch enough Hollywood director interviews, you’ll invariably hear him or her cringe a bit about their earlier films. The experience will ultimately change you and your craft will inevitably become better with every film. So, if you decide to submit a film in your early growth stage, increase your odds by considering smaller, local/regional and targeted festivals.
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