Do Film Festivals Allow You to Upload Your Film
What to Consider When Managing Submissions for Your Moving-picture show Festival
Film festivals provide a captive audience unlike anything most independent filmmakers have experienced, with the winners elevating their contour nearly overnight. Even if an entry doesn't win, a good showing can bulldoze increased interest in a feature film, brusque, or other project for months.
But film festivals are also a lot of difficult work for filmmakers. Submitting to multiple events is an emotional, draining, and costly experience that often leads to thwarting: According to NoFilmSchool , only 60 of around 9,000 films submitted to the Sundance Film Festival final year were accustomed. That'due south an acceptance rate of just 0.half-dozen percentage.
Other film festivals receive an even larger number of submissions: The Austin Motion picture Festival , for example, received more than than xiii,000 in 2020. While smaller festivals don't become nearly as many, the book of submissions can nonetheless be significant, especially for smaller teams with tighter budgets.
That means content ingestion—the process of moving assets into a management system—adds upward to a ton of work for traffic coordinators tasked with managing all that content. Collecting and storing submissions for film festivals requires speed, efficiency, system, and an archival system of sorts (for future productions, retrospectives, licensing deals, etc.).
Here are some best practices and considerations coordinators should keep in mind to ensure a polish festival launch.
Attempt to be flexible (especially postal service-Covid)
Some picture show festivals accept eased up on various rules and regulations in response to what has been a pretty challenging year for filmmakers. Tribeca, for case, eased its submission guidelines around projects that premiered online. And Sundance extended its submission deadlines to account for filming and other disruptions throughout the past year.
To brand things even more convenient for filmmakers to submit content, some festivals also allow submissions through links from video hosting sites like Vimeo or YouTube. Just remember to permit submitters know they should password protect their video (so it's not live on the public cyberspace prior to screening) and suit privacy settings to allow for embedding.
Decide on digital vs. physical submissions
Photo by Smart on Unsplash
How festivals receive content has inverse notably over the past several years. Just check out the job requirements of a impress traffic coordinator from 2015, which includes monitoring the "shipping and receiving of all films and videos, including origin, carrier, (and) tracking number," "timely delivery to and pick up from festival venues," and working "with shipping companies to import and export films."
Things accept conspicuously inverse a lot since then, when physical submissions were far more than common. While many large festivals, such every bit Cannes , still accept concrete screeners on DVD, BETA, Blu-Ray, and HDCam, a growing number practice not (including Sundance and TIFF ).
Handling and managing physical submissions is always much more than time-consuming (both for you and the applicant) than digital uploads through a cloud solution.
All this is to say: There are no rules when devising submission guidelines for your film festival, just be realistic. You tin can accept concrete media for a slight uptake in submissions merely information technology will create a lot more work for you and your team. Digital submissions are faster and more price effective for everyone.
Consider your file transfer costs
As a technology-savvy picture festival yous're going to need some style of accepting digital submissions, only which route to take?
ENTERPRISE
Enterprise file transfer solutions such every bit Aspera tin can be plush ($13k-plus per year for its most pop almanac plan or $1.24/GB on a pay-as-you-become plan) and fourth dimension-consuming to set and manage, particularly for smaller or mid-size operations with limited It resources.
SUBSCRIPTION
Many large file transfer solutions require a subscription of at least a few months to a year, which tin exist overkill for a one time-per-year festival. Services such as Dropbox bring value only besides hard limits on storage infinite , file upload sizes, and the number of users per business relationship (Dropbox Business concern merely allows upwardly to three users per account). That can make dealing with hundreds or thousands of external submissions tricky – especially when you can't automate the upload and download process.
FILMFREEWAY
A number of large festivals utilize FilmFreeway , a flick festival submission management platform, to handle their content submissions and perform other tasks. It's a great choice for pregnant festivals receiving large feature films (FilmFreeway doesn't charge by the GB), or festivals that don't charge admissions fees (it'south free for the latter).
Other pocket-sized and mid-tier festivals, however, may have trouble swallowing the costs of FilmFreeway'south commission-based pricing model, which charges six pct as a standard rate on all entry fees or four percent if used every bit the sectional submission tool. If y'all demand all the proceeds from entry fees to assistance pay for other festival services, so yous demand to increase your entry price to adapt FilmFreeway'due south commission.
For context, MASV charges a flat PAYG rate of $0.25/GB (which can lower costs dramatically for festivals with hundreds or even a few thousand submissions) along with an even lower price per GB via volume data custom plans.
It's besides worth noting that FilmFreeway also requires every applicant to sign up for an account before submitting their content.
Consider ease of use and other limitations
Speaking of FilmFreeway: Although information technology's a terrific service, it does cut off submission sizes at 10GB. While that's completely serviceable for both brusk and feature films via compressions and conversions (such as converting a large 2K file into a 1080p mp4), filmmakers must sacrifice visual or audio quality to run across these specifications. File size limitations can also cause some confusion and even hesitancy on behalf of less experienced filmmakers.
As mentioned earlier, many file transfer solutions tin likewise be tricky to implement and use—some have steep learning curves, others require It skills to set up, while still others have perennial problems with firewalls or run into other technical glitches. That's the concluding thing you demand when festival staff accept to process dozens (or even hundreds) of submissions per twenty-four hour period.
Keep your file transfer service cloud connected (and automated)
You can cut down on hours of manual work downloading, then re-uploading, then re-downloading, and and so re-uploading videos—not to mention final-minute runs to venues to deliver content for screening—through a file transfer solution with automatic cloud connections.
MASV portals is a deject connection tool that can completely revolutionize a film festival'southward content ingestion workflows, by automatically transferring incoming files straight to deject storage:
- The MASV Portal is your submission tool
- Entrants can upload their videos through a public elevate-and-drop interface, without needing an account
- As an admin, you tin configure each Portal to automatically download those videos to your deject storage of choice
- You can besides apply Portals to automatically categorize and shop incoming content by genre, film type, or other criteria every bit it arrives
With Portals, anybody on your team – including other coordinators or screening personnel at film festival venues – can access the fully uploaded, categorized file on the cloud within minutes of it being uploaded.
MASV for pic festivals
MASV allows for an unlimited number of Portals, teammates, and amounts of information sent or received – providing your film festival with a fully brandable, fully flexible content ingestion tool that doesn't crave annual subscriptions.
"The Oak Cliff Film Festival benefited profoundly from using MASV for dealing with digital file print traffic. Information technology's a great tool and piece of cake and fast for our filmmakers sending DCP's and other massive video files."
– Barak Epstein, Festival Director & Co-Founder, Oak Cliff Film Festival
Filmmakers don't need to create an business relationship or log in to submit their work, and it's easy to ready multiple Portals to automatically sort videos past category and save them to deject storage, making abiding re-uploading and re-downloading of content a thing of the by. MASV offers seamless connections with cloud storage providers such as Google Deject Storage, S3, Microsoft Azure Storage, and Box Cloud Storage, and SaaS digital asset management tools such equally Frame.io and iconik.
A global network of 150-plus servers ensures every parcel travels the fastest route no thing where it originates, helping filmmakers in remote regions or with challenging connections more easily utilize to your festival.
Plus, it automatically recovers from lost Internet connections, and so there's no need for your filmmakers to babysit their file transfer until information technology's complete.
MASV's browser-based interface is designed for simplicity – anyone able to utilize electronic mail can fix and utilise MASV with no training or tutorials – and is deployed across highly secure, MPA-certified cloud infrastructure from Amazon Web Services. All transfers are TLS encrypted both in flight and at rest.
MASV also offers a gratuitous trial that gives y'all 100GB worth of data to play with. So requite information technology a try. While 100GB won't exist plenty to cover your submission volume for this year (we hope), it'll at least give y'all a good idea of what you're missing.
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Source: https://massive.io/blog/managing-submissions-for-your-film-festival/
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