Analysing the Festival Run (Genre films)

[Above: some of the Songbird team in the audience at The Short Cinema film festival - one of our favourites! Image credit: Pamela Raith]

   If there’s one thing I get asked about more than anything else, it’s film festivals. That's increased tenfold since a recent post I did on Twitter blew up more than anything I’ve ever shared on the platform, showing that filmmakers still have so many questions (as well as a little rage and confusion) about the festival process. By no means do I claim to be a festival guru, but after nearly 18 years of playing the film industry ‘game’, I hopefully have a few helpful words of advice.

    A while ago, I did a 2-part blog post which analysed the festival run of my short film, Night Owls. A lot of people got in touch to say how useful this was – and what I said in those posts still very much stands. For example, you cannot expect a film festival to accept you just because they’ve accepted your previous work. Some do, and that’s awesome, but most of the time it’s like you have to prove yourself all over again. For example, some of the festivals which accepted Stop/Eject rejected Night Owls, and then some of the festivals which accepted Night Owls rejected my later films.

    However, I have been meaning to do an updated festival advice blog post for a while, because Night Owls was a drama film, and the three films I’ve released since have all been fantasy/sci-fi pieces. Although some of the basic festival principles remain the same, in other ways it’s been a completely different kettle of fish.

    So, without further ado, here’s a little reflection on the festival runs from my last three shorts – Songbird, Growing Shadows, and Lepidopterist – and my key learning points from each of them:

 
 

SONGBIRD (Festival run 2018-2019, selection rate: 25 out of 124)

    Songbird’s festival run is unique in the fact that I didn’t handle the first year of submissions myself; I outsourced this task to Katie McCullough and her lovely team at Festival Formula, and as such, I cannot do a full analysis of the first twelve months. I’d wanted to try working with a festival doctor, particularly Festival Formula, since 2015 - when Night Owls had just been completed - but Songbird was the first film that had a large enough budget to enable us to do that. 

   If anyone is considering using a festival doctor, my biggest piece of advice is this: it’s not the same as having an agent submit a solicited novel to a publisher on your behalf. Essentially, do not assume that having another company submit your film for you will increase its chances of getting selected – it does not. The film festival will still judge your film for what it is, and whether or not it fits within the schedule they have planned. But what a festival doctor can do is recommend which festivals to submit to, and Katie introduced me to a few wonderful festivals I’d never even heard of before (and of course I’ve submitted my other films to them since then). Festival doctors also have good relationships with festivals, and so they can sometimes get you nice things like discounts or waiver codes. Also, if you don’t have capacity to handle the festival submissions yourself, the simple fact of the matter is that outsourcing the job can take a huge weight off your hands and free up a lot of your time to focus on other tasks.

[Above: more of the Songbird team at The Midlands Movies Awards, collecting one of Janet Devlin's numerous and well-deserved awards for her songwriting. Image credit: Philip Eldridge-Smith]

   I did handle the second year of Songbird’s festival run myself, which is very much the simpler year of the two, because your film’s premiere status has been and gone, and you can submit to any small (and ergo easier to get into) festival you fancy – so we did see an increase in festival acceptances during that time as a result. Songbird ultimately went on to win 26 awards (most of which were awarded to Janet Devlin and the film’s fantastic composers), with a total of 25 festival selections. It was also the first of our films to ever screen in Canada, due to our acceptance at The Fantasy/Sci-Fi Film & Screenplay Festival in Toronto. 

   (There's a couple of videos of Songbird winning awards online - firstly at The Midlands Movies Awards, and also there's a little video under the photos in this post from the Nexus Awards, although I was a little under the weather when I made the speech in the latter!)

   Ultimately, Songbird's release was seen as moderately successful; we didn't get into any big festivals (e.g. BAFTA/Oscar qualifiers), but we did have a decent number of selections on the whole, and it did very well with DVD sales and a temporary release on Amazon Prime.

    Across both years of the festival run, we did notice two factors which frequently restricted Songbird’s chance of being selected. The first was the run-time; our original cut was almost twenty minutes long, so we had to make a few difficult choices in order to get the film under 15 minutes, to give it even the slightest chance of being selected for festivals – most of which have a strict run-length limit (the original version of the film, labelled the ‘extended cut’, is still available as a bonus feature on the Songbird DVDs). 

   But even then, some festivals still found the film to be too long. Festivals only have a limited amount of time in which to screen their shorts, and selecting shorts which are closer to 5 minutes – over Songbird’s 14 minutes – means that they can include more films in their programme. Audiences also tend to get a little bored if, when they’ve already seen numerous shorts in one sitting, a film comes along which is more than 10 minutes long. One festival programmer even got in touch and said they would’ve considered Songbird if we could make it even shorter, but by that point we’d already taken so much out, that cutting it down anymore would’ve butchered the story.

[Above: The super-cool New Renaissance Film Festival in London, where Songbird's production assistant Steve Giller kindly represented the film in my stead]

    The other issue we faced was that Songbird didn’t have one clearly defined genre. Festival programmers like films which can be simply labelled as one thing, just as all marketers do, because that makes it easier to find an audience for that film. Songbird is a fantasy film, but not 'high fantasy' (meaning an epic story that takes place in another world - or the distant past - with numerous mythical creatures), and like most of my work it closer resembled Magical Realism. There were some dramatic scenes, performed fantastically by Janet and the rest of the cast, but the fantasy elements stopped it from being classified purely as a drama film. It was a borderline musical at times, but never fully. Because of all the above, we were initially advised to not submit Songbird to genre-specific festivals, but I'm glad we reconsidered, as we did get about a quarter of our selections from those festivals. 

   The age rating was also cause for debate – is it a family-friendly film, because it feels like a fairytale, or are some of the scenes too distressing? We were rejected by all the family-friendly festivals we entered, but then, right towards the end of its run, Songbird did win 'Best Family Friendly Film' at Lady Filmmakers Festival in 2019.

 

 

GROWING SHADOWS (Festival run 2019-2021, selection rate: 7 out of 10)

    Growing Shadows was always designed for an online release. It was first launched on YouTube, where it’s done very well with over 43,000 views to date (the most-watched video I’ve ever shared). I didn’t really expect much of a festival run for the film as a result, as many festivals don’t accept films which have had a scene or more publicly online – at least they didn’t before the pandemic changed the rules a bit. But having the film online actually impressed one film festival, who invited me to submit the film for free because he wanted to screen it so much, which surprised me. (Please note, this transaction was very different to all the spam-bot festivals who email or Tweet at you and ‘invite’ you to submit… for a massive fee… and then reject you anyway. Do not fall for those festivals!!).

    In addition, because Growing Shadows is a fan film, it technically contained copyrighted content which did not belong to us, which made us ineligible for most festivals as a result. We could only submit to a very small number of festivals which either had fan film categories, or solely selected fan films. However, because this genre is so niche (the opposite of Songbird, which wasn’t quite niche enough), and because Growing Shadows was a well-crafted example of the genre, we did very well at those select few, specific festivals, resulting in the highest selection rate of any of Triskelle Pictures’ films, by a long way – our final stat was 78% acceptance.

[Above: One of Growing Shadows' few physical screenings, taken at Five Lamps Films in Derby a couple of months before the Pandemic hit]

    The only thing that dampened Growing Shadows’ festival run was the pandemic, which happened about half way through. The majority of our festival screenings moved online, and the brilliant Geekfest, a festival which usually tours around the USA doing multiple screenings at numerous comic-cons, sadly (but understandably) couldn’t give us as many screenings as they would’ve done in previous years. But we did have a few more physical screenings towards the end of the film’s festival run, particularly with the return of short film nights – and since Growing Shadows was still doing well on YouTube this whole time, the online screenings weren’t so much of a disappointment as they might’ve been for the films which were predominantly designed for the big screen.

    Which brings me on to…

  

 

LEPIDOPTERIST (Festival run: 2021 – 2022, selection rate: 7 out of 39)

    Ah, poor Lepidopterist – it was a case of bad timing to the extreme! The first lockdown in Spring 2020 gave us time to finally finish the film, which was sort of a blessing. But just as we completed the film and set up our FilmFreeway page, festivals around the world closed their doors. Those doors stayed shut for almost another year, and sadly, some never opened again. By the time the festivals came back in full swing, there was a backlog of films all vying for a spot in their programmes, resulting in an increased number of submissions worldwide and an even smaller chance of success.

   Pandemic aside, there were a couple of elements which let Lepidopterist down, much as my team and I all loved the film. Firstly, it suffered with the same issue as Songbird: the genre was hard to pin down. It was intended to be a Sci-Fi film, but it was a very small, contained story, competing for screening slots against films set on faraway planets and with multiple visual effects, which genre-focused festivals tend to favour. (This isn’t always the case, of course – for a good example of a subtle sci-fi film, without VFX, that did well at festivals, check out Keith Allott’s excellent Lifelike.) Even the fantasy-specific festivals that had accepted both Stop/Eject and Songbird didn’t want Lepidopterist, which is another example of the point I made at the very start of this blog post - you can't expect a free pass with festivals, just because you've screened with them before!

   Once again, Lepidopterist was more comparable to Magical Realism than anything else – someone even commented that the style was like Amelie, which I don’t quite see myself. It could also have been marketed as LGBTQIA+, but only based on a couple of scenes, which isn’t enough to target those specific festivals.

[Above: Filmmaker Q&A after the screening of Lepidopterist at Paracinema Film Festival. That screening really meant the world, as it was the moment we were finally able to show the film to a physical audience. Photo supplied by Andrew Rutter.]

    Finally, and it pains me slightly to say this, but I feel as though Lepidopterist’s budget level was a bit off-putting for festivals. There are exceptions to every rule, and a very simple story with minimal actors and locations can be done well with next to no money – but I do feel as though a showstopping short film with a large budget and lots of flashy, immaculate scenes will always catch a festival’s eye more, particularly if the budget allows for a named actor. That’s a very pessimistic thing to say, and I know that it isn’t the case for all festivals, but I think there is at least an element of truth to it. 

   Particularly with sci-fi films, you need a large budget in order to pull off the level of production design and VFX that fans of the genre have come to expect. If you don’t have those type of funds, you run the risk of over-stretching what your film can be, and cracks appear. Lepidopterist was made (admittedly with a lot of love) for the Sci-Fi London 48hr challenge back in 2019, originally released under the name FIFTY/FIFTY, and anything compiled within that short time frame, without a polished script, is going to struggle to compete against the ‘big boys’.

    It wasn’t all doom and gloom for Lepidopterist, though; the film looked fantastic on the big screen at the few festivals and film nights we were able to attend, including Birmingham Film Festival, which showed the film on a huge Imax screen. Birmingham Film Festival had actually rejected every other film I’d ever submitted to them before now, so this really was a success story for Lepidopterist amidst a subpar festival run. And it did win a couple of awards along the way. Another highlight was when the film was shown at a lesson for fledgling film critics, aged fifteen, who reviewed Lepidopterist as a practice run – and I really loved the words they shared. I hope the lesson inspired them.

 

*

    I'm aware that I've name-dropped a few film festivals throughout this blog post, so I think it might be useful to do a separate post at a later date, giving a list of all the sci-fi and fantasy-focused festivals I'd recommend. But for now, to summarise everything I've learnt from six years of only marketing genre films, I believe these were the common takeaways: 

   Understand your film's genre - and do so in a very specific and obvious way. If your film can't clearly be defined as fantasy or sci-fi, then it may be more suited to a general festival which accepts all genres (although remember that they still need to market it and find an appropriate screening slot). Growing Shadows is the best example I have of being specific: it was a fan film, pure and simple, and it had a high selection rate at fan film festivals.

   Knowing your film's genre, and marketing it accordingly, is all in service of your audience. Think about what your audience will expect from your film's genre, and that includes expectations for your budget level. If your film is over-stretching its budget, and cannot match the expectations of a sci-fi loving audience member - particularly in terms of scale and VFX - then it's better to strip back and do something simple (but clever) with the genre instead, as long as that then doesn't make your film harder to market in the process!

   Even with everything I've learnt over the years, festivals still surprise and baffle me on a regular basis. And with two films currently starting their festival runs (Good Grief, directed by Rob Sharp, and  A Different Place), I'm sure I'm about to learn and re-learn a lot more. I'm particularly keen to see whether or not A Different Place's BFI NETWORK-funded credentials will impact its selection rate. I'll be sure to report back to you all on the other side, hopefully with good news. Any wishes of good luck are certainly welcome! But for now, I hope all of the above was helpful in some way.

   And if you are in the process of submitting your film right now, or if you've just had your heart broken by yet another rejection email, I have one final piece of advice. To quote the fantastic A Handmaid's Tale: Don't let the bastards grind you down!

Sophie