How did my short film Gone Fishing actually perform, and download the spreadsheet to use on your film
You can see from the rough ratios from the chart here – ‘Win’ means a festival we attended and collected award(s), ‘Loose’ means we attended but did not win an award (though around 15% of these are non-competitive festivals so we could not win anyway), ‘Reject’ means that we were declined by the festival, and ‘Pending’ means we are still waiting to hear from the festival if they have accepted us or not.
Sara Morrison handled most of our festival work and there are various posts throughout the blog about her experiences and views.
Over the last year, all the data was entered into a spreadsheet which you can download here. You can use this for you festival push if you like – we hope to build a more automated spreadsheet in the future too. We also had a wall planner spreadsheet (you can access using the tabs at the bottom of the spreadsheet) which we originally downloaded from David Forster here. This was a way to track when and where we were screening so we could ‘see’ our campaign in order to manage choices about attending and also consider print traffic – it’s expensive to ship prints, DCPs and tapes around and festivals generally only cover ‘shipping out’, so you want to move your prints and tapes from ‘festival to festival’ rather than ‘festival, back home, then out to next festival’ (this can save a huge amount of admin and money). Some are now accepting Quicktime files, but that makes me nervous, especially for features.
The spreadsheets also contain detailed notes (denoted by a red triangle at the top right of the cell) and drop down boxes so that you can sort or search for different criteria.
In time I will pull more data out of these figures, including a cost / time analysis with regard to submission fees, office admin, DVD / print duplication and traffic, and build it all into the Gone Fishing online workshop. We will also include these stats broken down by territory too, and I suspect the USA / European ratio will be fascinating.
We listed all our awards on our dedicated Press website here. It’s broadly in date order, with the big awards listed at the top as we guessed many people would glance at the first few and may not mine down into the full list.
Onwards and upwards!
Chris Jones
My movies www.LivingSpiritGroup.com
My Facebook www.Facebook.com/ChrisJonesFilmmaker
My Twitter @LivingSpiritPix
This is all really useful info, Chris – thanks for sharing.
Thanks Chris! That rocks! Wish we had had something like that a year ago when we started taking Shadowland to the festivals.
Congrats on all the great Gone Fishing happenings!
Awesome Chris. It’s very similar to the one I use for Voodoo and Papiroflexia, just a bit more in-depth.
I use a lot of color coding (green for done, yellow for pending, red for wtf!), but I used a column for notes which now I see was a waste of space. Your little note arrow thingies are fantastic.
Hey Chris – this is such a wicked resource. Thanks so much for making it available to others. You obviously put a ton of work into it. Well done!