Try and use older systems to grade on; the high end is more expensive.
When do you grade?
Full grading is often the finishing touch undertaken as a final step before the film goes onto the screening format.
With video formats grading is left until the edit has been locked and the film is otherwise complete. After all there is no point in grading shots that won’t make it into the final cut. Grading can be time-consuming, so you don’t want to grade any more footage than you really need.
When a film has been shot on either S16 or 35mm the film will often be transferred from the negative twice. An initial telecine, to transfer the film to a video format for creating an offline edit, will not be graded as such as this footage is merely for creating an offline EDL.
Once the film has been edited offline, then the EDL is used to telecine or scan the relevant parts of the negative, and at this stage they will go through a full grade, so that you eliminate the need to grade all of the footage, and can concentrate on the parts you know are going into your finished film.
29. MASTER AND SCREENING FORMATS
Apart from choosing a format to shoot your film on you need to choose a format or formats to master and screen your film on.
Having completed a finished version of your film, you then need to output it, producing a master version of your film that all subsequent copies are made from. This should be at the highest quality warranted by the resolution at which you have completed the rest of your workflow. It’s common practice to create a master copy on several different formats for different duplication and screening options. Most transfer and post-production houses will allow you to master your film to a single format and then make duplicate versions onto other formats. As a general rule, the prices both for the actual media (such as tapes) and the actual transfer costs are generally reflected in the quality they provide.
35mm print
Creating a 35mm screening print is the ideal for exhibition screening in cinemas and film festivals. Classic film printing from 35mm negatives or S16 blow ups offers incredible quality. New laser-scanning technology now also allows transfers from low or high-resolution video formats from MiniDV to HDcam, which also produces outstanding results. The drawback to this quality is the expense. Creating a film print from a negative is costly but transferring from video is even more expensive. Video to film prices vary depending on the technology and quality involved; they generally average at about £1,000 per minute. Some international film festivals will only accept films from 35mm prints.
Figure 53. 35mm screening print. Incredible quality but very expensive.
HDCAM-SR, HDCAM D5 and HDCAM
HD formats provide incredible quality for creating a master copy of your film that can then be used to create film prints or lower-resolution copies. Although HD formats are superb quality there isn’t really much point in having your film transferred to one of these formats unless it’s been created at HD resolution. HD formats are still not standard for film festivals and only some broadcast. Soon this will all change and HD tapes will be the screening formats of choice, but for the moment it is still DigiBeta.
Figure 54. HDCAM tape stock. High resolution but not currently accepted by many film festivals.
Digital Betacam/DigiBeta and Betacam SP
DigiBeta is generally the short film standard master and screening format, and most broadcast and film festivals will require a DigiBeta screening version of your film. Although standard resolution, it is a very high-quality and stable format. Beta SP is the analogue equivalent, and is also screened at many festivals. Both NTSC and PAL versions need to be produced if you are intending to distribute your film internationally.
Figure 55. Digital betacam. Standard format for most broadcasters and film festivals.
MiniDV
Although some festivals will screen MiniDV tapes, the fragile nature of the format is not ideal for either mastering or screening.
DVD/VHS
Most film festivals don’t actually screen DVD copies of short films. However, they are often required as preview copies to send to festivals for the selection process. They are also essential formats to have multiple copies of your film on, as they are ideal for promoting your film, being far cheaper and less cumbersome to send out than the screening copies.
30. DISTRIBUTION
FESTIVALS
Film festivals provide short filmmakers with an ideal platform to bring their films to audiences around the world. They potentially give you the chance not only to showcase your film, but also to meet other like-minded filmmakers and promote your film to distributors and backers.
There are literally thousands of film festivals that run annual screenings. They range from huge international film industry showcases, down to small independent festivals.
There are several important factors that differentiate types of film festivals from each other. The first and most obvious is that not all film festivals are short film festivals; some are just film festivals geared towards screening feature films, but will also run a short film programme. The others are short film festivals that exclusively show short films.
Even given this simple division, there is still a huge amount of short film festivals, some of which specialise further in a type or genre of short film, such as comedy or experimental; others cater for all kinds of short films but have different programmes for different categories of film.
Some of these festivals run each programme as a competition with awards and cash prizes, while others are non-competitive.
The common factor between all these festivals is that, competitive or not, they all have a selection process through which your film will have to go. Only if it’s selected will it be shown.
Given that there is so much variety when it comes to film festivals, the best approach is to develop a list of film festivals that you want to target. To do this, it’s a good idea to have a look at your motivation for making the film in the first place. If you have made a short film with the purpose of trying to promote yourself as a writer/director, and are aiming to one day direct a feature film, then you are going to need a very different strategy to someone who has made a short simply to exercise some creative freedom and experiment with the medium of film.
You should research as many festivals as you can and try and work out which festivals would suit your film. Different festivals will give you access to different audiences, and they will also have very different selection criteria. Which type of festivals you decide to enter should be decided on the grounds of which type of audiences you want your film to be seen by. Ideally you should target festivals that are both likely to cater for a film such as yours and to have a selection process that will mean it is likely to be screened.
Many film festivals charge a submission fee, which covers the administrative costs of dealing with your submission and does not lead to profit on their part, but only spend the money if you think it is worthwhile and your film has a legitimate chance of being selected.
Aiming for high-calibre festivals such as Cannes or Raindance may seem like the fastest route to a large audience, but there are factors that you should bear in mind. Most large-scale festivals will be aimed, primarily, at promoting feature films, and are normally industry and sponsorship funded. They will, however, often have a short film section, for which there will generally be a fee for submission. The fee will be non-refundable and will get your film into the selection process. This does not mean your film will necessarily be selected. Larger festivals will often only screen films that have a 35mm print (see formats). If your film is not on 35mm then transfer can be extremely expensive. If you have been planning for this since the early stages of your film then the large international festivals can be the ideal arenas for your film. However, you should also consider the fact that short films at these festivals are often given second place to features, so don’t always get the attention you might hope for.
There are a growing number of festivals dedi
cated solely to short films. They range from very established international festivals such as Clermont Ferrand or Oberhausen to regional independent festivals such as Halloween or Brief Encounters. Large international short film festivals are often designed to partly function as a showcase for the television and distribution industries, with many of them running a film market for distributors and buyers parallel to the festival itself. If you are aiming to sell your film, or have it distributed by a company, then these festivals are geared towards helping filmmakers promote their films to prospective buyers, and are a great place to network and meet other filmmakers, as well as watch a lot of other films from around the world. They also offer awards, which, if you are lucky enough to win, will help raise your film’s profile.
The smaller-scale short film festivals are also ideal places to show your film and view other filmmakers’. They are generally organised and run by people that are passionate about short films, and don’t have the pressure of commercial backing. They are great places to see up and coming filmmakers’ shorts, and are worth attending whether you have a film to show or not. The smaller festivals generally have more of a filmmaking community atmosphere and excitement about them, and for many filmmakers there it will be the first experience of watching their film on the big screen. They also offer you the chance to meet people who have probably been through similar experiences in getting their short made.
Not only will these festivals be orientated towards short films, they often have screening and selection programmes that are divided into more specific genres. Rather than just submit your film into an eclectic short film section, you can enter it into a specific genre that fits your film’s profile. Not only will your film be screened in the relevant genre, it will also be judged for selection or awards based on the merits of how it performs within the genre. So, for example, if it is a comedy, it will be judged against other comedies rather than against a horror or experimental film.
With over 3,000 film festivals taking place round the world every year, it may be a good idea to start out by submitting to a local regional festival first, then work outwards from there. Festival organisers generally attend as many other film events as they can, so you will often be invited to submit to other festivals by organisers who have seen your film at another event.
INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP ILSON (FESTIVAL ORGANISER)
With roots going back to 1994, Halloween Short Film Festival has been running since 2004. Set up and run by Philip Ilson and Kate Taylor, Halloween has rapidly become one of the most cutting edge short film festivals in the UK.
What led you to set up a short film festival?
Halloween had been running as a screening organisation for short film since 1994 – and there’s a ‘history’ on our website at www.shortfilms.org.uk – but to sum up, we initially started screening short films above pubs after being inspired by Exploding Cinema shows. There were few other screening opportunities for shorts in the mid 90s, so in the wake of us and Exploding starting out, a few other film clubs sprang up and in 1995/6 we collaborated on an underground film festival called Volcano. Although Halloween held monthly screenings for five years, mainly at Notre Dame Hall off Leicester Square, we began to branch out into multi-media and music events which included Kentra in London, Sensurround, which was a touring event for the British Council, and then, in about 2001, Full Length at the ICA, which was where live bands performed new soundtracks to feature films. In the early 90s we kind of dropped out of regular shorts screenings mainly because there were so many; with audiences being spread out, they were going down. With the amount of screenings there was an element of overkill. Also, short filmmakers weren’t getting anything special by getting a screening in a bar in, say, Peckham.
But looking at the climate in 2003 with all these screenings, there were no film festivals purely dedicated to shorts outside of Brief Encounters in Bristol and Kinofilm in Manchester; certainly nothing in London. Of course, shorts screened in festivals, but always as a sidebar. As we had ICA support with the Full Length events, we put in a proposal to them to set up a short film festival, but in using the ICA we could have the Halloween multi-media stamp by using the live music area and bar, as well as two cinemas for screenings, which is something we hadn’t really done before – show films in a cinema!
How do you see Halloween in the context of other film festivals that screen shorts?
Halloween has a ‘brand’ that we hope is a bit more edgy and away from the industry; we’re not interested in Cannes or Soho House, but look for quirky leftfield or lower-budget work. Not to say we won’t screen the big stuff – John Williams’ Hibernation won an award at this year’s festival, to add to his cupboard-full of awards from around the world. We also championed Andrea Arnold from her first film and held a retrospective of her work on the eve of her Oscar triumph, and now she’s up for a Palme d’Or in Cannes for her first feature. But we like to champion work that may not get screenings at more mainstream industry-led festivals, and it’s good to mix these varying types of films within the themed programmes that we curate.
Also, this year, we had a music documentary shorts strand – because this is something that no other festival has done, we’ve toured the package around the UK and it’s also played in Berlin and Amsterdam.
In the years since Halloween started, have you noticed an improvement in the visual quality of the films that you have screened?
Not really. Some of my favourite short films are those from when we first started screening shorts in the mid 90s – Andrew Kotting, Jamie Thraves, Alison Murray, Vito Rocco. In many ways, the quality of ideas is worse, as there’s an element of ‘anyone can do it’, so there’s an excess of bad films. Not to say the gems and masterpieces aren’t out there. Also, on a purely technical front, we don’t look for technically brilliant filmmaking, but for ideas. This is echoed in competitions like DepicT!
What do you look for when selecting short films for the festival?
Good question, but impossible to answer. The selection process is purely a personal taste issue. I think we’re quite harsh at Halloween, but there’s only two of us and each year more films come in. Harsh, but fair… I like it when a programme comes together and it’s like your baby that you’re proud of. You’re excited about people coming and watching the films and discovering them for the first time, echoing the feeling you get when you first see them.
What are the benefits for filmmakers of showing their film at festivals?
Screening in a festival has better kudos than in an obscure bar, and I hope that doesn’t sound too snobbish – after all Halloween came from these bars in the first place. Also, Halloween doesn’t care about films having previous screenings, like many festivals do. Something like Hibernation must have screened in every venue in London before we screened it, and it still won an award. What slightly annoys me is that filmmakers on their CVs mention the venue over Halloween. As we use the prestigious ICA and Curzon cinemas, the ICA Short Film Festival or the Curzon Short Film Festival sounds more impressive than the Halloween Short Film Festival. But hopefully we can build up a brand.
What kind of audience do you get attending the festival?
The unfortunate answer is ‘friends and family’ – by default, the main audience at a short film screening are those connected with the films on the screen. Annoyingly, whole waves of people crowd out of cinemas after their film has shown, which is really disrespectful to other filmmakers who have their work on. But it happens. We try and make our short film programme themes of interest to a general audience though, and our horror and Fortean programmes usually sell out on theme name alone. Also, Halloween has all these other elements, such as the live music and bar visuals events, so we always make sure performers tell audiences that they’re here as part of a film festival.
Have you seen a rise in the number of people attending film festivals?
Yes, the audiences are bigger due to their being more films and filmmakers. But there’s still that elemen
t of saturation point, I’m sure. Short films or short film screenings also go through ‘trendy’ periods, where the media picks up on them, which means a more general audience attends. Our Kentra nights back in the late 90s were featured in The Face and Dazed & Confused etc, so that whole ‘cool’ thing meant more people wanted to be part of it. This still continues with ‘brands’ like onedotzero, and we do hope the Halloween brand continues to make people want to attend regardless.
Have you seen short film directors that have shown at Halloween go on to direct features?
Yes, many. Although, unfortunately, very few have done it successfully. Promising names like Jamie Thraves, who made some great late 1990s’ shorts and got a name as a promo director for people like Radiohead, disappeared without a trace after his first feature The Lowdown. We did screen Guy Ritchie’s first short in the early days…
One director we’ve been championing since Halloween started is Andrew Kotting, and he still continues to make excellent work in a variety of art forms (we’re working with him again on an arts project). Another Halloween fave Alison Murray has made a superb debut feature Mouth to Mouth, but she’s been having trouble finding a UK distributor. Bizarrely, we showed a short film by Scottish filmmaker Jim Gillespie who hotfooted it to Hollywood and made I Know What You Did Last Summer. But of course the current name on everyone’s lips is award-winning short filmmaker Andrea Arnold whose debut feature Red Road won the Jury prize in Cannes, amongst many others.
Short Films Page 21