Out of the three websites given to us, the only one I was familiar with was FilmFreeway – and that’s only because I’ve used it to enter a few script competitions in the past. Of course, while entering these competitions I was pretty single-minded and created the account so I could enter – and did not spend any time looking at the website.
For example, I had not yet set up a profile picture, etc. and my account home page looks like this… and, the page was on private, so only I could see it.
I started setting the page up, though some elements were a little more relevent to IMDB (or something)… and I was more interested in putting the time into looking at competitions.
After finishing up with my profile (though I realised I am wearing the same outfit in my display photos to my photos on set… even though they were different days (I don’t want it to look like I’ve only ever been on one set)), it looked like this… which I was quite happy with. I’d like to get a resume together at some point as well.
Before I started looking at competitions, I decided that I’d make the profile on the other accounts to see what they were like. I’m glad I did, because when I went to withoutabox, I saw this message… and decided to let this one go. I don’t think that I’ll have many submissions before this date.
(the website was very aesthetically pleasing, though).
Finally, I started making my account on filmfestivallife, which I found to be a lot less user-friendly. Firstly, it kept telling me that I needed a username… and I had one, it was just invalid/used. But the site didn’t tell me why it wasn’t working, so I had to keep changing it until the site accepted it. Not a huge deal, if I was making an account with a festival in mind I would certainly have kept going, but it definitely wasn’t welcoming.
Then, one of the first things you see is a big ad for a package that allows you to submit for films cheaper. And as much as it’s a good thing that there’s cheaper submissions, it being the first thing you see was a little off-putting. Still, I went to the user page in order to set up my profile, and saw that images could only be 4MB. So had to resize everything.
But, if everything from there is easy to operate, then those initial things shouldn’t matter too much.
I did see that FFLife was able to act as a social media platform, though then realised that the you only really add people through Facebook… then, I looked into the film festival search, and realised that the search engine wasn’t the strongest. It can be hard to find what you’re looking for… THAT SAID, the website both listed a) film festivals that you needed to submit using other platforms (I like this because it’s honest) and b) did not necessarily put the most ‘popular’/funded festivals at the top – you could see festivals in all different countries and ones that were not huge. It will definitely be useful for through research into film festivals.
Meanwhile, I had a look on the FilmFreeway website, and it was definitely the most visually pleasing. I particularily likes how ‘screenwriting contest’ was an option and wish I had used this search application earlier in the year – it’s defiantly going to be useful.
But for our film, I looked into festivals that might be appropriate. At first I didn’t realise that ‘Gold’ just meant you got a discount and had dismissed them because I thought you needed to be a rank to enter (or something), but since that wasn’t the case, I could look at those as potential competitions as well.
There’s pretty much limitless possibilities… as much as I’m interested in some of the bigger festivals, but would like to look into them and the kind of film that wins before we decide on anything.
And, we actually have to finish it and decide it’s good enough first.
