As we have decided that we will not be entering more festivals (unless we have good reason to), I thought now would be a good time to tally up some statistics for the whole Gone Fishing campaign. So 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.
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 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).
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 already have much of this data built into the workshop but it is based on figures from the beginning of the 2009). We will also include these stats broken down by territory too, and I suspect the USA / European ratio will be fascinating. At the end of 2009 we will be running a Final Analysis workshop for all people who have signed up top the online workshop (which will also be filmed and added to the workshop online for those who cannot attend in person).
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 galnce at the first few and may not mine down into the fulll list.
And if you have not seen it yet, some time ago I posted an interview with US short film maker Alex Fazeli, which is fascinating. You can watch that here.
Finally, if this is the first time you have read the blog, we also shot lots of great video blogs behind the scenes at festivals, many of which are packed with tips and hints – the best ones are listed on the left here under ‘Blogtastic Dates Of Distinction’. The 2009 Rhode Island Film Festival is about to start in the USA, but you can see our misadventures at the 2008 festival here – this was vital as it was out first step on our Oscars 2009 campaign.
Onwards and upwards!
Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
This is all really useful info, Chris - thanks for sharing.
Posted by: Lara Greenway | August 12, 2009 at 10:25 AM
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!
Posted by: Gayle Gallagher | August 12, 2009 at 11:09 AM
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.
Posted by: Joaquin Baldwin | August 12, 2009 at 05:22 PM
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!
Posted by: Liz Hover | August 13, 2009 at 05:45 PM