Saturday was our first day of production on my third short film, The Dinner Scene. We got a huge boost from The 102 Cafe in Garden Grove which allowed our skeleton crew to film in a corner during business hours on a handshake (and the price of a few beverages). At my budget level, this is the only arrangement that can get the cameras rolling.
That footage is already 95% edited – it was a swift process because I scripted every single angle that I wanted, obsessively planned the shot list and, with real-life g*ddamn wizard J. Van Auken on camera, we executed 70 shots in just 4 hours; 90% of them in single takes.
We shoot the other half of the short on June 3rd – which just happened to be when the second location and the actors could all be plunked onto the same calendar square. It’s made for an interesting workflow of putting all my work and anxiety into Day One, then getting to celebrate, relax, and then re-start the cycle for Day Two. Almost like making two shorts; which in a way is accurate to the concept of this one.
Using multiple locations is new. So is using SAG-AFTRA talent – which so far has led to more paperwork and more negative cost riding on the movie that I’ll need to scrounge up eventually; but hasn’t proven a major burden or obstacle yet. It was time to add those elements to my toolbox.
Turning myself from a pure screenwriter into a filmmaker has definitely led to changes in how I conceive of scripts I intend to produce/direct. Major parts of the aesthetic of this short were dictated by my pre-awareness of what my resources and shooting conditions would be. With the cafe open for business, we knew capturing dialogue would be a time sink and possibly ineffective no matter what, so the character in the cafe only has two spoken words. That knowledge got baked in at the script stage, and was enormously beneficial in making it possible to execute the short.
I like what I’m seeing so far. It is all too possible that I could completely faceplant on Day Two, but it’s good to feel muscles building in the meantime. That’s been the point of making this investment in myself – to build muscles and open doors.
Which means that even mid-production I’m already looking ahead on the calendar and devising the film’s festival strategy. Coincidentally, a friend recently completed his own first short film and asked if I would serve as a Festival Strategist on it. I can’t guarantee him fest bookings, but my hope is that my own experiences can show him a way to spend his money smarter out there. I’d love to see him get a healthy list of bookings, first because he has made a solid and involving short that deserves to be seen; but also because I would love, after he follows my advice, to not look like a jackass.
So not even a month removed from The Retriever‘s final festival screening, I am already neck-deep in my spreadsheet of fees and submission deadlines again.
I will continue to reiterate and expand on these ideas as my education continues, but I think I have loaded enough knowledge and opinions in my head to share a few helpful principles I have developed so far.
1) Budget your submission strategy at least as carefully as you budgeted your movie.
For each of my first two shorts, I spent roughly the same amount on fest submissions as I spent making the movie. Don’t stumble into a rude surprise like that; have a plan from the start for how you are going to access those financial resources. In the case of The Retriever, festival travel and lodging ended up costing more than production and submissions combined; and if you skip out on the experience of attending some festivals, you’re not getting the true reward of having done the thing. So remember that the cost of achieving your goals in making the movie go well beyond the costs of just making the movie.
There are thousands of festivals out there, and every week there are submission deadlines. They can become as tempting as the arm of a slot machine. And if you succumb, your pockets will be just as empty at the end.
How many festivals should you submit to? Probably more than 1 and less than 200; but beyond that, there is no universal right answer to that question. You want a decent enough spread to take some measure of the world’s response to your work (my left brain LOVES data points!), but there is a point of diminishing returns, and eventually you need to take your attention off promoting past work and devote more of it to making the new stuff. So while there is no one answer, deciding in advance how much money you have to allocate can help you arrive at an answer that protects you from going broke; so I like that answer.
For reference and transparency, I spent exactly $713.50 on my festival submissions for The Retriever. That covered submissions to 34 festivals. 8 accepted me. (Yes, that means I got 26 rejections. The scars are healing fine, thank you.)
By my standards, 8 acceptances was a big win. Standards, you say?
2) Save money by having realistic standards and personal growth trajectories!
I have never submitted to Sundance. Or Slamdance. Or Tribeca, South by Southwest, Cannes, Toronto, or any of the other festivals that the movie industry truly sets their watch by. I am proud of the work I do, and the dream of being a Sundance filmmaker is intoxicating. But I don’t have grand illusions about the quality of what I am making right now. And what I know about the submission numbers for Sundance tell me that you can make a short film which is better than 99.8% of the short films made all over the world in any given year…and still not get into Sundance.
The truth is this: There isn’t room at Sundance for all the shorts which are good enough for Sundance. And I don’t even think what I’m making right now is good enough for Sundance. Maybe I am magically more ingenious than I realize, but I don’t think so.
On top of that, there is an intense amount of behind-the-curtain politicking that can happen at those top-tier festivals since money truly is at stake; so you don’t just have to be great, you have got to be that much greater than the “connected” filmmaker’s best.
If getting booked at Sundance is hitting a Grand Slam, my philosophy is that hoping to hit a Grand Slam is not a strategy. If the Sundance submission fee could pay for submissions to two or three other festivals, I find that a smarter use of my limited resources than giving myself the quickly-evaporating ego high of imagining someone in the Sundance Fortress watching my movie.
Don’t think this means I lack ambition, or am only looking for the highest percentages out there. If what I cared about most was just collecting the most laurels, I would submit constantly to festivals in their first 3 years of existence, when they have no reputation yet. I know of one festival that, in its 4th year, only got about 90 submissions total, across all categories (feature, short, documentary, music video, animation). They programmed over half of what they saw! Now I could go back there just because my odds of an acceptance would be good, but I am consciously ratcheting up the challenge to myself on each movie. The response of a nationwide community of film lovers is a better metric for how I am doing than the voices in my head; so the way to measure myself is not just to want more fests than The Retriever, but to want more discriminating fests.
I always keep handy AMPAS’s annually-updated list of Oscar-qualifying festivals. For those who don’t know, every year at the Oscars there is an award for Best Live-Action Short Film. There are five nominees, as with most categories. But from what I have experienced, a lot of the filmmakers making shorts don’t even learn how those five nominees are selected. How it works is: the Academy sanctions a list of worldwide festivals as “Academy-qualifying”. There are around 100 right now. The film which wins the Best Short Film prize at a qualifying festival goes on the candidate list for the Oscar nominations. Tens of thousands of shorts cut down to about 100, which are then reviewed by the Nominating Committee to arrive at the five honorees.
So getting accepted into one of those 100-ish festivals gets you into the ballgame that qualifies you for the ballgame, so to speak. For that reason, an Academy-qualifying festival is a bulls-eye for all the shorts in the world with the most resources, the biggest names, etc. It’s a different league of competitiveness. And so, as with Sundance, I have avoided them*. (*Sort of. Before I knew all this, I submitted my first short to Cleveland. We did not get into Cleveland.)
As I mentioned in a previous post, getting accepted at Phoenix really rocked my self-assessment of my work. Just to make it to a dance of that caliber went beyond my best expectations. So when I say that on my list of potential fests for The Dinner Scene I am including about a half-dozen Academy qualifiers, it’s not because I suddenly think I am Oscar material. It’s because I think it is worth the fees just to test if I can get accepted at all at that higher level of competition.
Right, those fees…
3) If it’s not Sundance/SXSW/etc., you can, and should, comparison shop
These days, I have set my personal ceiling for a festival submission fee for a short at $35. That number has no magic personal meaning, it’s just what I landed on after reviewing a few hundred submission fee schedules. There are great festivals out there charging more – up to $100 at some, for a short film! – but not a lot of them making the case for WHY they are worth so much more. From what I can tell there isn’t a lot of market correction happening with these fees, I have enjoyed experiences at festivals which charged me $20-$30 that far outstripped the best parties being offered by fests with an $80 entry fee.
If you really drill down past the biggest 6-10 festivals in the world and scrutinize in detail, you will start to see differences that make one 10, 20, even 50% better or worse than another. But is an $80 fest which is not Sundance/SXSW/etc. guaranteed to be 3x-4x times as good as ANY festival charging $20-30? I am not convinced the sticker price is accurately depicting the value.
If a festival has a five-year-or-more track record, enough community support to offer incentives to traveling filmmakers, a professional-looking website/social media presence, and a schedule that lasts a few days and includes some mixers and panels, then odds are that the $20-$30 one (and many of them exist) is likely to be close enough to as good an investment for your goals early in your development as the $80 one. The $80 one might be able to legitimately trumpet more prestige right now; but ask yourself how long that’s going to last when they are pricing out up-and-coming filmmakers and the interesting films start showing up elsewhere; and is a CHANCE at accessing that prestige worth sacrificing shots at three or four other festivals?
You’re always looking for that balance which helps you take the most advantage of the strata you’re in as a filmmaker right now. You are able to place more bets (and thus gather more data) by budgeting for the spread of festivals that works best for you. Even setting my own ceiling as low as $35, I have already generated a list of over 50 festivals which have history, good reviews, and legitimate sponsorship. And in several cases, I now have a past relationship with them which helps me know if my new short is the type of thing they would program.
I doubt I will submit to all 50+; probably more in the mid-40’s. If I get the same number of acceptances as The Retriever, that’s a success to me because this is a more challenging target list. If I win an award anywhere, especially at a festival I have previously attended like Phoenix or Durango, that’s a success because I’ve accumulated a few honors and nominations but nothing that actually takes certificate or trophy form. And if I can sneak in the door of any of those Academy qualifiers, then I will know that even on this more realistic, pragmatic path I have been plotting for my Filmmaker self, I’m moving with rocket skates on.
So THAT, over 2,000 words later, is my process; which may have its flaws but I like the results I am getting from it for the moment. I know how verbose I get, but my feeling is that the more real and non-sensational this gets for you (the young filmmaker I imagine reading this), the more you are able to focus and apply your true talent and work ethic to it and not just feel like you are flail-boxing a fog monster.
Future blog posts, I am sure, will revise all of this. In the meantime, I have to go find a turtleneck sweater at Goodwill for one of my characters.