The website Film Festival World (http://www.filmfestivalworld.com/) has been a great resource in determining our film festival strategy.
I’ve been wary about film festivals. In 1999, I did the production on a feature film called Ka’ililauokekoa. It was a low budget film, but never the less did very well at the film festivals. When I did the math on the ticket sales at these festivals I found that these festivals grossed 2 times the budget of the film. This was very unsettling for me since the film never got a theatrical deal.
There are definitely festivals to go to where the exposure is worth giving the festival free content, but that is the conscious decision every filmmaker must make: Who am I willing to give free content to? What is the non-fiscal payback?
Tribeca recently announced they are following Sundance into the VOD distribution model. David Poland sums up this idea better than I can: Festivals Raping Filmmakers… Or Just A Friendly Reach Around?
The site had a spam attack. Over 3000 spam messages filled the Comments on the various posts. We only had about 100 real comments, but there was no easy way in WordPress to preserve those and get rid of the spam. I’m pretty confident that the new filter will prevent this from happening again. Back to your regularly scheduled programming….