Indee Blog

Marketing your festival to filmmakers can be an expensive and relentless affair. There are turnkey options with an expensive buy-in, like Withoutabox’s mailing list, or Google’s adwords. But there’s a slew of other options that you might not be using. Read on to learn about all your options.

Call for Entries Mailing Lists

Mailing lists are the most popular form of Call For Entries. They are very effective and the response is almost immediate. However, it isn’t always cheap.

Withoutabox – The behemoth when it comes to call for entries. They have an extensive mailing list and festivals see an immediate jump in submissions as soon as they are mentioned in one of  Withoutaboxs’ mailers. However, it doesn’t come cheap. It is approximately $700 to be mentioned in their mailer along with several other festivals and it ranges up to over $2000 for an exclusive mailer.

Indee - (disclaimer: we are Indee) Indee’s mailing list is smaller than Withoutabox, however it is doesn’t cost anything. Every festival that uses Indee’s system has one exclusive Call for Entires email included for free. An example of this is included here. Several festivals sign up for Indee and Withoutabox simultaneously. Additionally, Indee runs Google Ad campaigns for festivals, see below for info on this.

Self-promote – Never underestimate the strength of your own mailing list. If obtained the right way, this is a list of filmmakers who already recognize your festival, who’s films you are already familiar with and they might have had a great experience in the past. While it may not be as large as the other two mailing list options, it is likely to be much better targeted.

Cost-per-click adverts

Facebook, Twitter & Google ads: Costing you between $0.50 – $1 per click, these aren’t cheap. However, it gets you to the right source: Filmmakers searching online for film-festival call for entries or identifying themselves as filmmakers. Targeting your keywords and demographics is paramount here. Focus should be on conversions rather generating traffic. It is less expensive and far more effective.

Festival aggregators

There are a slew of festival aggregators out there. Many have lousy interfaces, so its hard for a filmmaker to find what they’re looking for, but most are free, so it doesn’t hurt to list on these. ($) indicates that you pay to list on these sites.

• http://topfilmfestivals.com ($)
• http://openfilm.com
• http://filmfestivals.com / http://fest21.com
• http://www.festivalfocus.org/
• http://www.filmcommunity.com/
• http://www.filmfold.com/
• http://www.filmfestivalsource.com/
• http://www.shortfilmcentral.com/events/
• http://www.insidefilm.com
• http://festivals.documentaryfilms.net

Festival or film centric blogs & magazines

It might help getting ,an article mentioning your call for submissions on these. Don’t expend too much energy or resources on these though. Most properties with significant traffic will not dedicate a post for a single festivals Call for Entries and many of the smaller ones don’t get enough traffic to make a dent in your submissions. But it’s always worth just shooting a note to see if they will mention your festival.

• http://www.contestwatchers.com/
• http://www.filmmaking.net/
• http://moviemaker.com ($)
• http://filmmakermagazine.com/ ($)

PR Firm

Of course, there is always the really expensive option of hiring a PR firm to get all of the above done for you.

Have I missed any? Please post them in the comments.

MIFFF is the premier genre film festival in the states of Washington and Oregon. The event was created to offer exposure to films that traditionally are overlooked by the festival circuit from genres including action, fantasy, horror, and science fiction.

Deadlines are on:

• April 30th 2012
• May 21st 2012
• June 11th 2012

Submission fees range from $15 for the early deadline to $40 for the final deadline. Submit your film today!

Indee would like to welcome the two new festivals that have signed on so far in January.

The Maelstrom International Fantastic Film Festival – MIFFF

The premier genre film festival in the Pacific Northwest. It runs in October over the weekend of the 5th to the 7th in 2012.

Westport Youth Film Festival – WYFF

WYFF is organized by the Westport Arts Center in Westport, CT. It focuses on youth films from across the world.

We’re really excited to have them both on board!

Oxford Film Festival got in touch with Indee with a specific problem. They had wrapped their submissions with Withoutabox but still had a lot of their submissions on DVD and needed to speed up the judging process.

Additionally, to generate more buzz around their festival, they wanted to send the films to the local press but realized that most of the press never returns the DVDs sent to them. Furthermore, it was becoming expensive to copy and ship DVDs to the additional press they wanted to target this year.

Enter Indee.

Indee automatically pulled a report from Withoutabox with all the films Oxford was interested in having online. We got all the DVDs digitized and online in 480p DVD resolution.

Soon enough Oxford was ready to send the films securely to their judges and to a vast number of press screeners to generate the additional buzz around the festival.

The man hours Indee saved Oxford in not having to manage and mail DVDs to the press and judges is estimated to be about 30 man hours, and this is just for a small fraction of their actual submissions.Some of our larger festivals save more than 500 man hours by switching to Indee. This doesn’t even begin to factor in the additional cost savings in eliminating the overhead of managing DVDs and a judging system.

Find out more with a free demo from Indee.

You want to make your film festival more fetching and deck it up with a bit of glitz and glamour. You settle for the classic favourite- a tried and tested idea of having a high profile guest or the recognizable director of one of the films attend your festival. Brillant, but soon enough you stumble upon the ‘Now what?’ scenario. How do you go about demystifying this delusional idea?

Well, if you are one of those bloody lucky festivals with a glut of funds, stop reading this and figure out how to reach the agent of said actor or director. Your money  will do the work for you. For the rest of the festivals however, here’s how we’ve gathered your peer festivals go about this.

As Kathy Kay of the Victoria Film Festival suggests, often throwing in flight tickets and hotel accommodation will get the ball rolling. Failing which, try clubbing it with what your location offers. The film fraternity loves experiences, so depending on what your town can offer, try to rope in sponsors to provide an experience to the visiting celebrity. A private whale watching trip in New England, a spa day in Arizona or a private event with the best chef in town giving a private barbecue in Texas. With the opportunity to get photographed with a celebrity shopping in their store/restaurant/spa, it’s a win win and a win. Offer this along with meals and top billing at the festival at the same time for added “wow”.

Christian Gaines of  Withoutabox says doing a bit of homework will go a long way. If you know whom you want in your festival, try and research what they do. Almost every celeb tweets and it’s a piece of cake to find what they are involved in. If luck has it, they might be into some kind of charity work. In which case, offer to donate your screening fee to the cause they are associated with. Not only does this show that you are interested in the celebrity but also in the charity and you end up feeling good having spent money on a good cause.

One of these might just fetch you the assertive nod you are looking for.

Can you think of any other strategies to convince actors and directors of your films to attend the festival?