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!

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!

In its essence, all it means is that the filmmaker is taking on the work of sales-agents & distributors and keeping all the proceeds that would normally go to them. One of the most important tools you need for self-promotion is a screener.

People always want to see some footage of whatever you’re pitching to them. Professional sales agents know this and they spend thousands of dollars on their screeners and shipping.

However, there are three huge concerns with DVD screeners:

1. High costs
2. Zero reporting about viewing and engagement
3. Easy piracy

Costs

Running the numbers, we see this is a huge expense for almost anyone. A screener DVD costs between $1-$4 to produce and between $3-$20 to ship. This ignores all those lost in the mail or misplaced and broken DVDs that usually adds between 10-20% to your screener budget.

Reporting

After sending out the DVD screener, there is zero reporting to know if the film has been viewed or even reached the recipient in the mail. Dont even bother obtaining more important metrics like your most popular scenes and which scene loses most of your viewers. Thats the kind of empowerment online screeners can offer.

Piracy

Imagine if you made Paranormal Activity in 2007 and have had to send thousands of screeners over the course of two years. Now it’s 2009, you’re just getting ready for a wide release. Dozens of the DVDs you’ve shipped over the last couple of years are bound to make it right into the hands of pirates the world over, ruining a great film with an early prerelease cut and terrible post production. Not to mention the lost revenue from piracy.

With online screeners you can choose to have your film expire in a day, a month or anywhere in between and get in-depth analytics while you’re at it.

Learn more about Indee’s screeners here.

Photo credit: SuperPipo2010

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?

I was part of the lynch mob that showed up with Netflix announcing its higher prices and splitting of the membership base into separate streaming and DVD factions.

Why would they complicate an otherwise terrific model of renting movies?

Netflix, as I remember,  is a company whose focus has always been their customers. They had it going for them with a flawless pricing and delivery model along with the sublime use of the renting queue to line up your movies.  They were amongst the earliest users of the  Javascript navigation on a mainstream site. My favorite is when they began offering streaming at the same price point with DVDs; sure it reduced their costs of distribution, but they were benevolent enough to offer this added functionality without premium pricing like I would imagine BestBuy or Apple would do.

With this great service offering, they were also making money hand over fist. Why then would they turn their backs to a very faithful and contented consumer base? Here are my two cents worth:

Higher Prices

Let’s be honest, the films on Netflix Watch Instantly (WI) are pitiful.

Here are the newest arrivals in the Comedy genre:

On the one hand, the studios expect to get the world for their premium content and on the other hand Netflix with their limited base(U.S & Canada) simply can’t afford it. Netflix, I think is attempting a gamble here to make it work by:

1. Increasing revenues per subscriber
2. Use the increased cash-flow to dangle the billion dollar carrot in front of the studios which are hurting in revenue growth
3. Get the primo films for WI
4. ???
5. Profit and Happy customers

I don’t know about you, but I would be more than happy to spare a couple of extra dollars to see a film worth 2 hours of my time on Watch Instantly, then the crud that’s on there right now. With historical evidence as my witness, I would much rather Netflix figure out how to do this than anyone else.

Splitting The Customer Base in to DVD & Online factions

Netflix’s concept of weaving DVD and streaming services as one package meant that every member, irrespective of the kind of service they chose, ended up being counted as a member with access to the digital version of the film. Now, the studios charge Netflix by the number of subscribers with access to the digital version of the film, and that is where the predicament lies.

A few well written words from a man wiser than I, Adam Knight

The Internet’s memory is short so let’s go back a week ago to when Netflix lost the Sony movies and almost lost Starz. Why did that happen? Netflix WI (Watch Instantly) subscribers passed a certain number specified in the contract with Starz and Sony and so they lost the right to stream that content. After some talks they came back online and now, one week later, Netflix is breaking apart their WI subscribers from their DVD subscribers. I find it hard to consider this a coincidence.

Having a ton of DVD viewers that are not using WI artificially inflated their WI subscriber numbers and almost invalidated a content contract. The only way to lower that number is to remove their access and only let people that want WI subscribe to it and pay into the service. So now WI isn’t a bundled service but one you ask for and pay for. This way, Netflix lowers their perceived WI subscriber count, keeps their content deals without renegotiations, and generally carries on.

It all boils down to how you can keep tabs on the films.  In an ideal world the studios charge Netflix for every film viewed. However, online rights are sold as purchased licenses based on the subscriber size. For Netflix, that number was inflated by DVD subscribers who would never watch a streamed movie. So until studios change their pricing models, Netflix has to do the dirty job of tidying up.

I am willing to give Netflix the benefit of the doubt and let them suck a few extra dollars from me to give me a more respectable library of streamed films online.

Netflix, you’d better deliver after this.

The format is just perfect, we’ve got three short films that will be interspersed with three delectable dinner courses. The Q&A session will be lead by noted film industry veteran, Kim Aubry, an independent filmmaker, long-time head of post at Francis Coppola’s Zoetrope and producer of films like Apocalypse Now Redux.

Act I

Short Film I  (Q&A about Film)

Any one of the following:

Organic Asparagus Soup,

Red Beet Cumin Soup or

Spicy Sweet Scallops

Paired with: 2009 Roussanne & Viognier   Donelan Venus   Sonoma

Act II

Short Film II  (Q&A about Film)

Any one of the following:

Mango Prawns,

Baked Fish with Cilantro-Chile Chutney,

Spiced Lamb Chops or

Sunchoke Uttapam

Paired with: 2007 Sangiovese   Two Mile Wines   Dry Creek, CA

Act III

Short Film III  (Q&A about Film)

Any one of the following:

Chocolate Chili Mousse Pie or

Banana Cream Pie

Paired with: Port NV Zinfandel   Chase Family Cellars   Hayne Vineyard, Napa

There is more information about the program here. There is very limited seating so please reserve your seat now.

Just writing this post has got me quite hungry!