Image courtesy i4LifeStudios

 So you're an indie film maker and you have a project or two completed, but where can you get them screened? Other than at home,or at a friends place, or uploading to YouTube or Vimeo, where are you going to get your movie on a "big" screen? Where are you going to find an audience?

It's not as easy as you might think.

There are many film festivals to which you can submit. Most charge a submission fee. If you get in to the "Early Bird" submissions, you will pay a lower fee. Fees range from as little as $10.00 to $50 and up.

There are a limited number of festivals which do NOT charge a fee.

The quickest and easiest way to find a festival that is appropriate for your film is to become a member (free) to Withoutabox.com. They have a huge database of festivals and many different search terms, so you can narrow down the search quite easily.

You can also submit to festivals using Withoutabox.com. In theory this is a very easy and secure way to get your work to a festival. However, in my experience, the user interface at Withoutabox.com is horrible, as is their so-called customer service.

Filling in your profile is not bad, but it's when you start to enter in the information about your film that the real fun begins.  The site lays traps for you. For example, when attempting to fill in your budget information, should you make a typo and attempt to fix it, the field for $ amount will reject your new input and will also give you an error message telling you that you cannot move ahead until this issue is rectified.  Since you can't rectify the problem because it won't let you, you have no choice but to restart everything from scratch. Hopefully they have fixed this particular bug by now.

Once you have successfully entered in your film info, you can browse the festivals, pick one which sounds right and select whichever one of your films suits, and fill in the information requested by that festival.  You can pay the fee by Paypal or Visa and your film is submitted to the festival by Withoutabox.  However, you may also have to drum up a hard copy of the film in the format required by the festival and mail it to them.

You also have the option of submitting your film directly to a festival where they allow this, which bypasses the Withoutabox struggle, but leaves you dealing directly with the festival.

Whichever way you choose to submit, it is now a waiting game. Eventually you may get a notification telling you your film has been rejected, or if you are lucky, accepted.

The competition is HUGE, so don't hold your breath.

Here's an update, I just found an excellent blog post about festival scams by Benjamin Craig on a site called filmmaking.net  - here's a link to it.

http://www.filmmaking.net/198/How-to-spot-a-scam-film-festival/