Film Festival Help

Getting a movie submitted to the South-By-Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival is a goal a videographer friend of mine has. I have been working with him in getting a business formed for the camera mount we want to produce and sell. His business is called Guerilla Gear and can be found at http://guerillagear.net/. We have a good team of writers and are close to completion on a script, but we need to make sure we have everything we need before we submit to SXSW.

While looking around, I came across a really good site to help me with, not only SXSW, but any other film festival. Film Festival Secrets’ site is really helpful in that it’s pretty much a one-stop shop for getting any question you may have about film festivals answered. The website’s creator, Chris Holland, has written a book called “Film Festival Secrets: A Handbook for Independent Filmmakers” and he offers the first to chapters of it downloaded for free as long as you sign-up for his newsletter. Not a bad deal in my opinion. The first two chapters deal with what you need to do before you submit and then when you do submit, however, the book covers a number of different topics like selecting the right festival for your film, preparing the screener for the festival, saving money on festival fees, creating marketing collateral and more. At $24.95 for a print version and $9.99 for Kindle or from the iBookstore, it’s priced quite reasonably for the amount of information it gives you.

The one thing that I thought really stood out on this page was that Mr. Holland offers his professional consulting on the film your company is planning on submitting. Having a your film screened by a festival programmer is very appealing because it gives you a direct sense for what the judges will be looking for when viewing submissions.

This site is definitely going to be of great help when our production company gets going. We have a lot of plans in the works and we all realize that film festivals will be an intricate part of our operations. Not only will we be able to showcase our films but gives us a chance to perform one of the most important aspects of this business…networking.