Promoting a short film
2nd February 2010
“The cost of promoting movies, the advertising and promotion of a movie, the budget is almost as large as the cost of the movie. And these huge blockbusters that you see have tens and hundreds of millions of pounds and dollars spent promoting them.” ~ Richard Attenborough
One of the biggest, and most important, things I’ve learned about making short films, in the last year or so, is about promoting them.
Looking back at numerous productions I’ve been on over the years, I’ve often come to the end of a shoot and thought, ‘Great, that’s half the work done.’, with the other half being the post production. I now realise that actually shooting a short film is about a quarter of the work! Promoting your film and submitting it to the film festivals out there, of which there are hundreds (probably thousands), is a huge task.
'Blind' DVDs ready to be shipped out to film festivals.
Now it’s important I mention two things here. Firstly, I am by no means an expert in this field. I have submitted my first proper short film, Blind, to around 30 festivals to date. So far it’s screened at two festivals although I’m still waiting to hear back from the majority of them. I was recently talking to a director I know and she had submitted her short film, which was a bit longer than Blind and had a much higher budget, to over 200 festivals! Out of those submissions it had screened at about 60. So my experiences here are to be taken with that in mind. I’ve only really tried to promote one short film and that has been on quite a small scale so far. I don’t doubt that one day I might hit triple figures for my festival applications. I hope then I’ll be a little bit wiser still, I’ll certainly be older.
The second thing, is that you might not want to promote your short film at all. A lot of people finish a project, then just put it on the internet for free, where anyone can stumble across it. That’s fine, and it might be just as good, better in fact, than spending ages researching film festivals and putting in applications. However, I think getting your film screened at a festival is a pretty cool thing and certainly helps to make your film stand out from the crowd. It also means that it gets a chance to play on a big screen, which is how it should be, right? It also means that you might win some competitions (and money!), which surely must be a big ego boost. The most important thing though, is that once your film has done the film festival circuit, which seems to be about 18 months after it has been released, then you can release it online, for free, and have a go at some viral marketing to get your film some exposure. You get the best of both worlds.
The way I see things at the moment is that you should treat your short film like a Hollywood blockbuster. Release it at the cinema first, film festivals. Then on DVD, there are various short film compilation DVDs or you never know, you might get a sales agent. Finally put it on TV for free, upload your film to YouTube. Of course that’s a somewhat simplified view of things, but hey, if it works for Spielberg, then it can work for me!
OK. So here are my top tips for promoting a short film, based on what I’ve learned over the past 12 months.
First of all, check out this awesome video on YouTube entitled ‘Beyond The Finishing Post – Marketing Your Short Film’. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Remember the director I mentioned who had submitted her film to over 200 festivals? Well this is a talk she did on promoting short films, so it’s well worth a look.
Make sure you’re prepared for the whole process, set aside time to do the work. I try to do everything myself, disc artwork, printing, burning, press packs the lot. This saves me a lot of money but also means I spend a lot of time doing things that seem like they have nothing to do with developing myself as a director. Don’t fancy an afternoon of printing out and cutting DVD sleeves? Then maybe it’s best to pay for a printing company to do it for you. This doesn’t include all the time it takes to research the festivals in the first place, fill in the forms and get everything packaged up and posted off.
If your film has a budget, make sure you save some money for submitting it to festivals. Blind was completely self-funded so I’ve been limiting myself to how much I spend to enter a festival. Obviously you have the postage costs to festivals all over the world, although that tends to be no more than a couple of pounds. There are lots of festivals out there that are free to enter but there are just as many that have an entry fee. The entry fees can vary, the highest I have seen was $100. I’ve given myself a limit of around £20 maximum for each entry fee and then I make sure I’ve researched the festival thoroughly to ensure my film fulfils the entry criteria and is the sort of film they are looking for. Remember, just because you’ve spent £20 on entering your film into a festival, doesn’t mean it will get screened. You might not even get a rejection letter/email!
Finally, have a plan for promoting ‘outside the box’ as it were. Blind is about a young blind boy, so whilst exploring the short film festival route I’m getting in touch with a few blind support organisations and charities to see if they could find the film useful in any of their work. For after that I’ve been researching a few sales agents, it’s a long shot, but worth a go. After that I’ve got my eye on a few online short film competitions and so on. I try to have a plan of action for every film I’m working on, even before I’ve shot it. If you can think of any unusual, but relevant, way to get your work out there, then make it happen!
One last bonus tip. Spend time on your shoot days to get some good quality stills that can tell your story in a few images. People have told me this time and time over but it wasn’t until I started putting together promotional images and press packs when I realised how important it is to have great stills. It can make your film look loads more appealing to festival promoters and only adds a few minutes here and there to your shoot. Just after you wrap a particular shot, stick a stills camera in front of the film/video camera and get your actors to pose accordingly to their actions in the scene. Sorted! Totally worth it.
So that’s it. A kind of whirlwind lesson in promoting a short film. I’m sure there’s lots more things I’ll learn as I spend time promoting my other short films, maybe in the future I’ll do a follow up to this entry. If anyone else has got any short film promotion tips, I’d love to read about them in the comments section below.
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