Marketing Profs

Film Festivals have become the prime venue where independent filmmakers launch their works to the public. Festivals offer an excellent place to build buzz about your film, find distribution deals, network, get press coverage, and experience an audience for your movie.

Despite the importance of film festivals, most independent filmmakers have not really considered how best to market themselves to these venues.

Too often, filmmakers create their works and leave the marketing to the very end, after editing is done—or they reject marketing completely in a fit of artistic defiance. These are terrible mistakes that can doom a perfectly good, or even great, film to obscurity.

The marketing of an independent film should begin at the beginning of the filmmaking process. The success of a film depends much on the form of the film, and I am not taking just about its creative content. Believe it or not, the length, or so-called runtime, of your film will determine much about the success or failure of your film on the festival circuit.

In my work marketing my latest film, I have statistically explored what makes a successful film on the festival circuit by collecting film data across more than 30 festivals (see my site www.lathrios.com if you want to explore the data for yourself).

What I discovered to the horror of the creative types is that the prime predictor of success for a festival film is its length, or runtime. Runtime determines where your piece can play, what distribution deals you can get, and even how competitive your films will be at winning awards.

This is not to say that craft is unimportant—but, rather, that your craft will only shine at a festival if it is packaged correctly.

How could this be?

Even though there are some 600 film festivals each year across the globe, it can be challenging to get your film into a festival if it does not conform to the needs of the festival programmer, which means first and foremost having the film cut to the correct runtime to fit into the festival schedules.

What is the optimal runtime for a festival film? It depends on whether you are making a short or a feature film, and whether you want to win awards. For those unfamiliar with the terms, festivals tend to program two lengths of films—shorts and features. The definition of a short varies, but it tends to be a film under 40-45 minutes in length. A feature is any film that is longer.