Finding information on festivals as a general subject was rather difficult as each is run differently with varying rules and guidelines as well as what it is looking for. The aims of the festivals are pretty much the same, these are; showing new talent, networking and bringing in audiences for the benefit of professionals, aspiring filmmakers and film fanatics in a more informal way. A problem I found was that most sources tended to list festivals, I suppose that leaves it to you to research further but categorising them would have helped the research process.
There are a lot of film festivals worldwide so the initial thing to do was narrow down the list of possible festivals to those in the UK. There are endless lists of film festivals around the country so I needed to find ways to narrow down the list instead of looking through all of them as that would be time consuming. I decided to look for more regional festivals, in Yorkshire and nearby areas. This made it quicker and easier to choose from and should my film happen to make it through to be shown it isn't as far to go to attend the screening.
The other aspect I had to take into consideration was the timescale I have between the deadline for completion and the submission deadline for festivals so that ruled out any festivals before June. This made it a little bit easier to chose a festival to submit my film to, though I want to keep my options open and not settle on one, as I feel that could control the type of film I make and will be restricting if it does not fit what they are looking for. I wanted to keep a couple of festivals in mind then decide when my film is completed and I could see which it was more suited towards.
I then looked through around 10-15 festivals at random from websites that listed festivals in the Yorkshire region and read up on what they were looking. I went straight to the websites for these festivals after looking at lists as this made the information more reliable and the sources valid. I knew they information would be more up to date. I managed to narrow it down to 3 festivals, these were: Promax, Encounters and Underwire, I later decided not to submit to Promax as it had not updated much from 2012 so I was unsure it it was running. The reasons I picked these were that Encounters is a huge festival and it would be amazing to get my film show there and I thought Underwire was interesting as it is only for women and I am making my film on my own. Underwire is the festival I am more drawn towards submitting work to for the reason it seems somewhat different to the others.
When looking at the importance of film festivals this was slightly easier as people had a lot to say about it, though it is mostly opinion in a lot of cases, from their experience of attending them and as "professionals" in the industry. It was all useful in getting a wider view of the importance on top of my own thoughts, in some ways it educated me as I had not thought of certain aspects like tourism being a positive outcome from festivals and how important that is for a city or town. I found some people's comments and articles quite interesting as they were quite passionate on the subject, which helped a great deal. I also sent survey's to film makers and film festivals on their views on the importance of film festivals and the responses were quite interesting and informative.
I looked in a fair few books but I did not find them as useful as articles, blogs and webpages on the internet. The blogs from film festival goers are not as reliable as their aren't informed sources the talk mainly from their experience with perhaps not as much knowledge of the inner workings of film festivals. They are great for some insight to people's views and getting an easy to understand overview but are not valid sources. The books tended to tell you a little about festivals, usually more towards one specific festival and list festivals around the world, as opposed to telling you how they benefit people and why they are an important aspect of the film industry. The Guerilla Film Makers Pocketbook was probably the most useful book on the subject of festivals, it has Q&A's from people specifically involved in festivals such as organisers and filmmakers. It gave a better insight than the other books and covered bits on short films. It gave an insight that all the other books did not offer. The books though quite limited on information about the importance of film festivals to the film industry are reliable sources of information. The Q and A section is more opinion from insides from their experience so is quite reliable because they know about it.
From my research I realised how important film festivals actually are, before reading people's views and experiences I did not really care about them even though they are a great way to get noticed and show your work, I was pessimistic about them. After researching I concluded that there are far more benefits to the festivals like gaining an audience, meeting people, the possibility of future opportunity and it gives you something to aim towards with your film as opposed to just completing it, there is a bit more purpose if you intend to get it out there. Generally with work I produce I do it for my own satisfaction and that is why I was reluctant towards festivals but now I feel differently and would like to submit films to them.
I think my strengths were finding various sources on the importance of film festivals. My weaknesses were the primary sources I could have tried to send it to festivals in a variety of ways as opposed to just tweeting them, I could have emailed them. This is something I would do in the future to gather more primary sources. I learned a lot about film festivals from this research. I could have looked further into the festival experience as a whole not just from a filmmaking aspect but a festival goer point of view to get a better overview of festivals and this would have given more range to my research. In the future I would look at doing this through surveys and interviews and perhaps even attending a film festival myself to get a better insight and give a personal opinion. Overall I would say my work is quite valid as I looked at sources directly and used the personal insights of people to get a better understanding of the importance of film festivals.
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