INDIE EXPOSURE : Short supply vs short demand

Craig Parkes ponders screening and distribution opportunities for independent short films.

It’s a common observation that the digital age has led to a democratisation of filmmaking and this is most evident in the short film arena.
Not only have the tools for the production of short films become more readily available, but the number of ways to get a short film to its audience is increasing at a staggering rate.
Now, once you have a master copy of your film, the ever-difficult question of “What next?” is troublesome not because of a lack of screening options available, but because there are so many.

Festivals
Due to the increasing interest in digital short film production, and the increasing availability of high-end digital video projection systems, there has been an explosion of theatrical short film screening options, both worldwide and locally.
This year, for example, there have been at least three brand new short film festivals in the North Island alone: Ohakune Big Mountain Short Film Festival www.bigmountain.co.nz; Magma Rotorua Short Film Festival www.magmafilm.org.nz; and Auckland’s Show Me Shorts film festival www.showmeshorts.co.nz. That’s in addition to such established short film screening opportunities as the Wellington Fringe Film Festival, the New Zealand Film Festivals, Moving Image Centre’s Shortfuse, Stubbies and many more besides (there’s a useful list on the Film Commission website: www.nzfilm.co.nz/sales_and_marketing/short_films.aspx).
This is a great boon to the local short filmmaker as there is nothing as rewarding as seeing your film with an audience.
As for the international film festival scene, it quickly becomes clear that a filmmaker could spend a lot of time applying to an almost endless array of festivals.
Recent developments to automate festival entries, such as www.withoutabox.com, make it easier than ever to find out about and send your short film off to international festivals. All you need is an internet connection and a credit card – and this is where things can get expensive. A quick check of Withoutabox shows it currently has details of 2961 different film festivals in 97 countries that one can enter. Most charge entry fees of US$15-$30 for shorts, and you’ll definitely incur postage costs with each and every application. You could very easily spend more money applying to film festivals than you did on making your film!
Even if you stick to the “A-list” festivals suggested by the Film Commission, you’re still looking at a fair whack in postage and entry fees (to enter a short in the Berlin fest, for eg, costs 50 Euros, plus postage).
Plus, the competition for such festivals is immense: last year, for instance, Sundance selected 73 short films from a staggering 4327 submissions and even smaller festivals are getting hundreds or even thousands of entries due to the ease of submission through online applications.
On the other hand, a successful entry to one of these big fests leads to fantastic opportunities like potential 35mm blow up through the NZFC and a pretty good excuse for an overseas trip.

Online
Having packaged up your short film and sent it off to various festivals, you hop on the net and check out Youtube.com or video.google.com and watch the latest webcam Korean lipsynching stars get several hundred thousand downloads a week – while no one has even seen your film yet! The temptation to just chuck it up there is immense, but will it do you any good?
In the sea of virally spreading content, having a good film online won’t necessarily help you. Online it’s about being different and timely so you strike a chord with enough people to get them to pass it on to reach critical mass – but even then most times it just ends up being a quick chuckle and then yesterday’s link. For every video that gets passed on, another 999 get ignored, and unless your short is really short (under two minutes) or is “borrowing” from some well-known existing material (fan films set in the Star Wars universe etc) it may be ignored. And all those views won’t amount to any money anyway, unless you are prepared to capitalise on the hype somehow (merchandising, a string of viral videos sitting in the bag waiting to be released and take up the advertising revenue, and so on). Generally it’s a case of all fame, no fortune, and even then the fame is very fleeting.
Fortunately, however, there are a growing number of opportunities cropping up in the marketplace for high quality unique content to be distributed online.
They’re all using different models and most are offering some sort of revenue sharing, where they host your short and either charge per download or attach some sort of advertising and offer a split of the income. I have looked at a few including the following:
Metacafe (www.metacafe.com) like Youtube but they share their advertising revenue with the content creators based on the number of views and ratings they get, the most popular of which has reportedly accumulated more than US$24,000 in income over a three-year period.
Biggy TV (www.biggytv.com – requires flash): an interesting new website that aims to build a network of high quality content that operates on a revenue share basis. Not in full swing yet but the creators seem to have some very good ideas up their sleeves.
Cinequest Distribution www.cinequest.org): Cinequest is actually a well known film festival, but they have started offering people applying to their film festival deals to package their films for pay per direct download and also DVD distribution opportunities.
A search of the internet will find many more. The most interesting aspect of these sites is that almost all their deals are non-exclusive, meaning that – in theory at least – your film could be screening on and collecting revenue from all of them while at the same time being available free from your own website/bit torrent etc. Whether this model works and is sustainable has yet to be proven but it seems like some people are making money.

So, what to do?
Right now it’s very hard to provide any hard and fast answers regarding how to get your short film out there. Having produced a self-funded short film during 2005-2006 (Big Bad Wolves – see box story for more details) I am struggling with this very issue myself. The following is what I have found and/or decided:
• Local festivals are great because you get to screen your film to an audience and hopefully you don’t have to pay much in the way of airfares to get to them. More importantly, they are a good opportunity to meet other local filmmakers and see what other people are up to. No matter what, I’d try to screen at the local fests.
• It’s a good idea, and fairly easy, to make a website for your short (we have www.bbwolves.com). A domain costs around $30 per year and web-hosting shouldn’t set you back too much either, depending on bandwidth requirements. Whether you go the festival route, the online route or both, a website is a useful part of the equation.
• Figure out who you want to see your film and what you want to get out of it. Whether you spent a bundle on your film or it cost you nothing, it was made to be seen. Most likely it was made to be seen by people similar to you – so if you like watching online, stick it online; if you like short film fests, try for the fests. Ultimately, if you like both, try both – just be careful with your money, it can get expensive fast.
• Don’t get delusions of grandeur. You’re up against tough competition when entering the big international fests and, even if your film is really good, it might not be worth holding out for these, unless you’ve managed to make a significant investment in your short (like a $80,000+ budget funded through an NZFC POD). It might just be better learning from the experience, putting it online and just maybe getting a few dollars for it, or having it go viral and getting to be the link of the day, especially if the goal is to showcase your skills.
• Finally, no matter what, get your short seen. You have no excuse not to have it screened somewhere. There are so many options out there and people worked hard to help you make it, so if you have something sitting around that’s not been watched beyond the cast and crew screening then there is no better time than now to dust it off.

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Big Bad Wolves – R16; 13 Minutes
An Awfully Grimm Production www.awfullygrimm.com director Rajneel Singh, producer Craig Parkes based on a sketch by Chris Kerr co-producers Annamarie Connors and Rajneel Singh in association with Afterglow Films www.afterglow.co.nz cast Mark Williams, Brooke Petersen, Gary Stalker, Otis Frizzell, David Stott, Russell Kirkby, Steven A. Davis.
Local screenings so far: Wellington Fringe Film Festival (July ’06), Ohakune Big Mountain Short Film Festival (October ’06 – awarded Best Director), Magma Short Film Festival (November ’06 – awarded Most Promising Filmmaker), special screening at the Hollywood Cinema, Avondale (December ’06).
International Film Festivals: None as yet. Awaiting decisions re: Clermont Ferrand and Berlin Film Festival applications.
Online distribution: In discussions with multiple online distributors.
Website: www.bbwolves.com
Contact: craig.parkes@awfullygrimm.com

© Copyright Onfilm magazine December 2006

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