Pre-Production Unit- Investigating Film Festivals

Myself and Charlie have recently begun investigating UK and international film festivals that we could possibly submit our completed major project film to. The main reasons for this is that not only would this open our film up to a broader audience and provide us with some much needed exposure (potentially leading us to further work in the future) but there are also very rewarding prizes for well made films, including funding for future projects and cash prizes (which would be fantastic for Charlie and I to pay for future projects or pay off any debts we may incur as part of this project.

I began my search for film festivals to submit to through a simple Google search, which delivered some useful results for both UK and international film festivals, many of which are specifically targeted to younger film makers. It would be advantageous for us to apply for a festival for younger film-makers, as an audience of said festival would be more likely to understand budgets restraints and difficulties we may encounter during production. Also, other films at the festival are likely to be similar quality to our own due to the film-makers having relatively the same amount of experience in film-making that we may have.
An extremely useful website I found which documents a lot of festivals both in the UK and internationally was the British Film Council Website, which has an entire directory on festivals, along with links to the official websites for each festival, highlighting the entry requirements, prizes and history of each festival.

I also decided to be more specific with the kind of film festival our film would be submitted to, and since I would define the genre of the film we are making to be "sci-fi/drama", I decided to look for independent science fiction film festivals. As a result I found out about Sci-Fi London, a London-based international film festival.

Sci-fi London would have been a fantastic festival for us to submit our film to for several reasons. For one, it is an international film festival, hosted in our home-country, which means we can expose our film to people from many different countries, without having to leave our own country. This also means we can attend the festival in person, and answer any questions that viewers may have about the film's story, characters or production.
All in all, submitting to- and attending this film festival could have been a very valuable experience, and could have been a fantastic starting point for Charlie and I to begin our film career outside of student film. Unfortunately, during my investigation into the festival, I came across this small piece of information in the entry requirements;

Unfortunately, I expect the film we create for our course will probably be around 15, 20 or 25 minutes, which will be longer than the basic criteria for a sci-fi film submission in this festival.
We may of course be able to submit a different, cut-down version of our film- but if we are to do this, we will have to be very careful not to cut any crucial story-telling moments, or anything that would affect the overall message the film is trying to send.

Another film festival I found was the USA based Phoenix Film Festival which accepts films in all kinds of genres, including sci-fi. Although the submission period for 2016's festival is now open, I don't foresee that our film will be shot and edited in time for the deadline.

We will continue to look for suitable film festivals throughout this project, and gather enough information to pinpoint exactly which film festivals we would like to submit to in 2016 so that we can provide an indepth discussion about our platform and why we have chosen it in our pre-production package submission.