glitterfish.com

For most independent filmmakers the first step to success is getting your movie played at Sundance and other high profile film festivals. To do this you’ll need to catch the attention of the person who wades through the thousands of submitted films to program the festival.

Mike Plante is the Associate Director of Programming at CineVegas and publisher of Cinemad Magazine. He was a short film programmer at Sundance for the past four years and has worked for film festivals since 1993. He is older than he looks but still energetic.

He is also a really cool guy who was nice enough to answer a few questions for Glitterfish.

I noticed that this year a lot of the shorts at CineVegas were pretty long. BugCrush (Dir: Carter Smith) was 38 minutes long and that films a total hit at festivals. Voicemail (Dir: Michael Wilde) was funny even if its one joke premise got a little redundant at 19 minutes long. Is the conventional wisdom that short films should be short (10 minutes or less) really true?

We also showed “Bob Log III’s Electric Fence Story” and “A Protected Witness: Maxson v. Clarkson” which are each 2 minutes long, if that. Bill Brown’s “The Other Side” is 45 minutes, but his films are always very unique, zine-like documentaries. The reality is every year there are 9 or 10 amazing shorts from 20-30 minutes. Then there are 1,000 ones that fail, that should be cut in half or should be part of a feature film, or left in a closet.

What’s the difference between programming for CineVegas and programming for Sundance?

We can show anything we want at Sundance, but there is definitely a more serious tone in picking films there. At CineVegas you can show something that is more rough cut-ish. That said, we showed “Bugcrush” and the Bob Log short at both fests.

Does it matter if I put my short film on the internet before I submit to festivals?

Unfortunately, yes. Some fests think that overplays the short. They are wrong. The viewing experience is totally different, and really – do you think by putting your short on You Tube everyone is gonna see it?? Shorts need all the help they can get. At Sundance we do have a rule that it can’t be on the internet after we select it, but we put many of the shorts on the Sundance website to maximize the exposure for your film.

I know that festivals compete for world premieres. Do I need to worry about where my short film premieres?

When it comes to shorts, Sundance does not care if your film has screened before. We do need it to be less than a year old or so, with a few exceptions. If it comes down to two films fighting for the last spot, we would consider how new each film is as one of multiple factors. As a filmmaker I would not play each and every festival known to man before trying to get into Sundance, Toronto, Telluride, Tribeca, Cannes, Berlin, etc. All of the big fests have different rules, look into them. Then all the medium and small sized fests can still show your film after that.

Can you give us some examples of effective or creative marketing that you have seen at festivals?

The best thing I’ve seen is filmmakers just engaging people that come to the shows, whether after a shorts program or while waiting in a lobby or a ticket line or reception. Not in a cliché producer way, that never works. But more of a “Hi, I’m a human being, you’re a human being, we’re all here to have fun and I made a little film. Wanna see it?” So have postcards of your film with a cool image and the screening times, and a handful of DVDs to swap with other filmmakers, producers, actors, or cool people you run into. Even if you run into a filmmaker you really admire by chance (I was in a line to get coffee with Peter O’Toole, Salmon Rushdie and Terry Gilliam - very surreal) they might be cool and take a DVD. Just treat them nicely like your Mom taught you to.

At the Puffy Chair screening the Duplass Brothers personally credited you and Trevor Groth for launching their careers. It must be vindicating to over the years, have followed their short films and now see them with a successful feature. Maybe you should be a producer’s rep?

Does that job include free chocolate? The Duplass Bros are very kind for saying that and we have helped them every way we can, but they are the ones that actually made the kickass films.

I made a short film that I think is ok but probably not good enough to play at Sundance or CineVegas. What are some smaller festivals I should look at?

You should submit it to both Sundance and CineVegas. Of course there are no promises, but the biggest mistake everyone makes is assuming that it will or won’t get in somewhere. We turned down tons of documentaries about playing poker at CineVegas. That’s on TV every minute of the day. One short, “Choked” by Todd and Brad Barnes, played Sundance, CineVegas and Clairmont-Ferrand (an incredible short film fest in France) and everywhere else rejected it. Crazy. Also, the “Napoleon Dynamite” guys thought their short wasn’t good enough for Sundance so they didn’t even submit. I would’ve played it. But things seemed to work out for them in the end.

Do you use myspace or youtube? Do you read blogs? What do you think of withoutabox.com especially their new Audience section? Do you have any thoughts about the web in relation to filmmaking?

MySpace is great for me finding punk rock around the country, and I’m interested to see if it can help films too. I don’t spend much time on my own account at all. I read the occasional blog but more coz I don’t have tons of free time at the moment. YouTube is amazing. Its too much stuff but an incredible resource you can wade through. Without A Box seems to work for the smaller festivals, which is cool. I don’t know enough about the service but am investigating. The internet is great because you can reach an audience without succumbing to the world of distribution. But the internet is a crappy way to actually watch a film. I am waiting for a cheap way to connect the net to a projector so I can watch a film in good cinema quality 20 feet wide. Fingers crossed.

Is there anything else you think short filmmakers should know?

Never make a film just in order to get into festivals. You’ve got to “need” to tell a story rather than just want to be involved in the film world. And the ten-minute rule is a good one….

I want to thank Mike for answering our questions and also for putting on such a great festival.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 30th, 2006 at 8:58 pm and is filed under industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.