Festival plan first draft

Distribution Plan

Festivals

5 Festivals

·      Crossroads Film Festival. Jackson, Mississippi

o   Named after a musical myth, the Crossroads Film Festival has a musical twist to it. They have entry categories for both short documentaries, and student films (both for a low price). The festival brings in music videos and local performers, so the theme of musical performance in our film will fit well.

·      Film Score. Knoxville, Tennessee

o   Film Score only admits films with either a standout sound design or musical narrative, perfect for our documentary. There is a short documentary category available for a reasonable price.

·      Apex Short Film & Music Video Festival. Rochester, Minnesota

o   Accepts only shorts, has a split focus on films and music videos. Inexpensive entry.

·      Longleaf Film Festival. Raleigh, NC

o   Hosted by the North Carolina museum of History. Has a focus on NC film.

·      Macon Film Festival. Macon, Georgia

o   Has a music documentary category, with a minimum of 5 minutes. Focuses on music and the southeast, seems ideal for our film.

Regional Festival

·      Cucalorus Film Festival. Wilmington, NC

o   Local, seems to have an appreciation for Wilmington filmmakers and local student’s shorts. Really want to get in.

Free Festival

·      Emerge Film Festival of Maine. Auburn, Maine

o   It’s free and I know people there, that’s about all I got.

cucalorus

Cucalorus was really awesome. I was lucky enough to have a Pegasorus pass this year, and I attended several screenings, including several shorts blocks. I really enjoy attending shorts blocks because it reduces the risk of randomly selecting screenings at a festival. If I don’t like a film, it’ll be over in a couple minutes. I also really enjoy them because I like the short form film as an artistic medium, and I think there are a lot of stories that are better suited for, or can only be told through, short film. One screening I went to, I believe it was called the Devils Tongue Shorts, was a midnight screening of horror shorts. The director of the best short in the block was in attendance, and he spoke before the screening. He said something that I really agreed with about shorts, that most horror movies take a concept or characters that would be wonderfully suited for a 30 minute run time, and stretch it into an hour and a half. The stories lose their power when they are slowed down to fill a feature length time slot. His short, The Babysitter Murders, was a fun and creepy spin on the cliché horror plot of the babysitter being attacked by a murderer while at home alone with a kid. It had amazing production value and a crazy twist that I didn’t see coming. It was a wonderful illustration of the director’s point about length. And, as tends to happen at cucalorus, several of the other shorts were really, really, weird.

            I cant really remember the names of all the other shorts blocks and screenings, because I attended so many, but some were called Trinidad Scorpion, some kind of pepper name or something, and another one that happened on Saturday morning. They were all pretty good, and I was very inspired to work on some shorts of my own.

Week 12

I recently changed direction of the documentary. Originally, I was focusing on the performers themselves and what we could learn from them about their community and practice. now we're focusing on the event of myself and my crew members performing downtown. shooting our remaining footage will be a struggle, we have a shoot scheduled for wednesday night, and we'll shoot twice after thanksgiving break. after that, what we have will be what we'll have, and I will do my best to construct the documentary i want to present from that available footage. This project has been made harder at every turn by weather, scheduling issues with crew and subjects, and crew issues that i won't go into on a publicly available blog. I am confident enough in myself to complete a documentary that I would be proud to submit to festivals.