3 Things About Creating a Film Festival

I've been trying to find things I can do within my new set of constraints:

-Can I work on it from home, whether the baby is napping or not?
-Is it in keeping with my overall goals?

Viola! There is something that fits that criteria - a film festival!

About eight months ago, two of my film-maker friends and I decided to start a film festival in my new hometown of Princeton, NJ. (Yes, my husband and I are that cliche couple that moved to the suburbs when we had a baby.)

You can check out the festival at www.princetonindependentfilmfestival.com, @prindiefest, Facebook.com/prindiefest.

But even though it may seem simple at first, a film festival actually requires a ton of planning and networking to get it off the ground.

I'm sure I'll do many posts on the process of putting this together in the months to come, but for now, before the baby wakes up (!), I'm just going to offer my three key observations for anyone who might be looking to start their own fest down the line.


1. You will be inundated with waiver fee requests from the moment your festival goes "live." For us, "live" meant the moment we listed it on Film Freeway. For every one real submission we get, we get about three people asking us to let them submit for free.

I get it. We're "artists," and we're broke. But we're basically not giving waivers and here's why:

- Our entry fees are super cheap as it is. $15 for students, $20 for a short, and $30 for a feature. Most tests typically charge $40 for even a short film, and think about it: if you have a two hour feature that at least five people have to watch and grade during the selection process, the team is spending 10+ hours on you. That works out to cost less than $3/hr, and the festival founders are actually watching many submissions more than once to give them our all.

-We're giving free access to the festival to all submitters (not just selected filmmakers), which represents a value of a lot more than max $30.

-Of the three of us,  all filmmakers, none of us would EVER have even THOUGHT to request a fee waiver when submitting our shorts!

We have granted very few waivers (at this point, 3 out of over 100 requests.) They either:

-Wrote a very fabulous and convincing letter about why they needed one. (Everyone else sent basically a one-line "Can I have a waiver?" email, sometimes not even signing their name or providing a link to a trailer. Why on earth would we give them one?)

-Have a "name" involved with their film. Hey, celebrities will help sell more tickets to screenings. It makes sense for us. (Even having said that, though, it's not a guarantee of a waiver. Kelly Ripa executive produced one project that requested a waiver and we said no based on other criteria.)

I'll wrap this section up just by saying that while there are very cost-effective ways to put on a festival, it still does cost money, and we need to make that money back. We haven't yet.

If you're going to create a festival, expect a million waiver requests.

If you're going to create a festival that actually survives financially, turn about 99% of them down.


2. Join the Chamber of Commerce. This would never have occurred to me. Thankfully, it did occur to one of my partners, proving that three heads are better than one.

It's easy to think of your area's Chamber as for corporate businesses only, but it's not. Joining as a film festival, we're making priceless connections to other businesses that can donate equipment (thank you Bristol Myers Squibb for the AV equipment!), locations for screenings, and more. It's also a great way to get the word out. We've connected with two local newspapers that will run stories on the event, and the Chamber will also promote the event and help us build a strategy.


3. Film Freeway vs. Withoutabox. Ugh, Withoutabox.

Ok, here's the deal: Film Freeway is free to list your festival. They only take a percentage of the money you make when people actually do submit, which is awesome. It's also easy to set up and very user-friendly.

But, sigh...

You are going to get a much higher caliber of submission from Withoutabox. And it's also going to make you more "legit."

The reason why is that Withoutabox, at this moment in time, requires you to be an incorporated business before it lets you list your festival. It's also still the industry standard, pretty much, and gets both your festival and the people submitting to it on IMDB - a big plus.

So, even though Withoutabox is our biggest expense to date - costing us in the four digits to get our fest on there - it's unfortunately a must!

Career Lessons From My Infant Son

8 months ago, I gave birth to my baby boy, Nicholas. Since then, it sometimes feels like I’ve done nothing other than care for and feed this little miracle.

Motherhood has come with a million challenges. One of my favorite things to say is that I never realized I was always a super-irritable person just trapped in a well-rested body. 

The sleep-deprivation and constant demands on a person’s attention are enough to give any new parent a melt-down. I’m not exactly sure what my impressions of babies was before Nicholas came along… I think I envisioned him sitting there like a loaf of bread while I worked from home… but, needless to say, I was way off.

I’m beginning to claw my way back toward being productive, though, with the help of some baby-sitters and also my baby (finally) taking a nap here and there. As I tackle some pretty big projects in the near future, there are three key lessons I’ve learned from my new motherhood that I take with me:

1. Efficiency is everything. 

On days when I have a baby-sitter, I get two hours. If he takes a nap, I get one hour. You better believe that in those precious hours, I am hustling. Not one minute is wasted - it is all 100% devoted toward my writing and my career (such as it is nowadays). I will never take time for granted again. 

1. Plan ahead and stay focused.

This goes hand in hand with the efficiency thing. What am I doing when we’re in the car and I don’t have to be occupying the baby in my arms? I’m planning out all the steps I need to take to accomplish the things I want to accomplish under my new, more challenging circumstances. And when I get the time to work? It’s all about focus. Same as when I’m with my now-crawling and standing little man, and I have to maintain constant focus to make sure he doesn’t get hurt. 

1. Don’t sweat it.

It suddenly occurred to me one day as I held a sweet, sleeping Nicholas in my arms: at the end of my life, no matter how the films turned out or whether or not the scripts got sold, it won’t really have mattered, because I will, God-willing, still have this boy thriving and a part of my life. So it’s not only ok to be fearless - it’s the only option that makes any sense! What’s there to fear in your career so long as what’s really important is safe and happy?

So go out and take risks, because at the end of the day - life is good, regardless!