The Film Festival Doctor (Yes, she’s a real doctor!) Dr. Rebekah Louisa Smith, shares with you today the secrets behind how to create a streamlined and focused festival strategy. As previously discussed, the ‘Stay At Home’ orders of the CV19 pandemic have seen a surge in creative writing and more scripts being written but also an increased anxiety in filmmakers waiting for selections to come in from film festivals.
There are plenty of things to do in order to distract you from this part of the process (regardless if there is a pandemic happening in the background!) and here’s my top 5
- Meditate – The film festival selection process is slow and things don’t happen overnight – therefore, staying consistently grounded and poised will benefit you in the face of any challenges. Meditating several times, a day (once in the morning and once at night) will calm your mind and build up resilience and ease anxiety. Headspace is the best app to use for this.
- Start a New Project – One way to not focus upon film festival selections is to start a new project – this includes everything – the planning, writing, and bringing the vision to life. As you know, this is a time-consuming process and time will fly by when you become immersed in this.
- Set More Goals – Ask yourself again ‘what do you want to achieve from the festival circuit with this film?’ only this time think about the bigger picture and focus more upon your long term filmmaking goals and personal film creative goals so you can integrate these into your whole overall filmmaker ’10 year’ plan.
- Create Your Travelling Budgets – If travelling the festival circuit means dipping your hand into your savings or taking out a loan, now is the time to cash flow so you can work with the right amount and decide what you need. A travelling budget includes putting money aside to pay for; travel, accommodation, food, drink, festival passes, an emergency travel fund in case you lose a bank card, travel insurance, Uber and generally getting around the area.
- Try Something New – learn a new skill that is not related to the film industry (such as Mexican cooking for example!) as something like this will help you focus upon taking care of yourself and not putting too much energy into your film.
As always, I love helping filmmakers create their festival strategies and this is something that I’d love to help you with. As a bonus to today’s blog, download your free guide ‘The 4 Main Reasons Why Your Film Is Not Getting Accepted Into Film Festivals And How To Fix it’ – https://www.thefilmfestivaldoctor.com/e-book/
Coming Next Week: I chat with The V.R. Film Festival Director George Burt about his recently launched groundbreaking festival, and how we will soon all be owning an Oculus headset.
