Animation Festivals
Don't keep your animated short films in the shelf, put them out there, send them on a World Wide tour, get acquainted, get famous, and if you are extremely lucky you'll find a Distribution deal.
If you don't have an animated short film yet but are planning to, be sure to have or own what can hurt you the most. The copyrights. Even though you animated the film and its truly yours, an aspect that is typically overlooked is the rights of the music. Without the consent of the author you won't be able to submit it, not even to one festival alone. Plan ahead to either have original music or to contact the author in advance, it takes time to find them and to get a response, a lot of emailing and phone calls.
Festivals are great to attend but if you really want to feel the adrenaline running through your veins, you'll have to attend a festival where your film is being screened, yeup; best feeling in the world. You'll be one of the lucky ones to see the audience's reaction to what you have created. All that hard work! that summer you didn't see the sun, all those frames you treated with so much care and gave all the love in the world. It will finally pay off, *sigh...*.
Then, when you start getting emails from festivals advising that you are in the middle of the competition with some other animated short films, you jump to their website to take a look at your competitors and its clear that yours its better than others, ahh... what a great feeling! there's no doubt that your film will pass to the next selection stage, so long suckers! see you later!, see you in --- the Whaaat? You get another email saying your film didnt' make it to the next stage? what's going on? again you are visiting their website to see who made it, and unfortunately you found out. You watch some of the other films and you can't help but asking How on earth did that short film (if you can even call it like that) beat mine? and here's another one, oh... and there's another one. Who are the judges? What are they thinking? Its unbelievable, they have no appreciation for what animation truly means... What da?
Then you get an email from another festival, your film is officially selected, they send you this crazy thick document with all the specifications that you need to meet for your exhibition copy, BetaSP, DigiBeta, what? 35 mm? that's time consuming and... mega-expensive, where am I going to transfer and... double take!, what whaaat? you need it at 30fps? but film is supposed to be at 24 fps. That means I'll need a 3:2 pulldown, how do I do this? Does that means that all my wonderful inbetweens will be touched electronically?, the animation will lose some fluidity?. ARgg, ease in, ease out, favor this pose, favor the other one. All this intricate work to end like this? *sigh...*.
Oh animation festivals... there are so many now. You will need a budget from $500 to $3000 us dollars for about 50 submissions. This is how you market your film, this is the administration side of animation. Remember to be selective when looking into festivals but not too much, otherwise your film won't make it in. They receive a lot of submissions, thousands of them!
A new online submission system is Withoutabox. Its a great way to apply to a large number of festivals making your life easy with tracking numbers, press kits, dvd's, festival categories, etc. Very cost effective. Thanks Withoutabox!
Animation Festivals are known as a proven method of getting your work "out there", they have a lot of variety ranging from experimental animation with very low cost techniques to more elaborated films using the latest technology. Any film can participate. Go on, show your talents to the world.
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