SCREENING YOUR FILM

There are many ways to screen your film to an audience, the most obvious in the day and age would be social media. With me creating a twitter for this project & a website for the project I already had allowed the project to be discovered and shared online.

But Facebook, twitter & YouTube are some of the most viewed platforms. Uploading your video to YouTube and then sharing it on twitter and Facebook, leads traffic from one site to another.

The next would be word of mouth, screening it in class or at an event. One thing I am planning to do with my project is to be screening it at Taunton Live in the summer, as interviewing Jenny & Liz, we got talking with how my film could played alongside how they could work more closely with the college, with plans for there to be a booth for me to at least play my documentary in progress.

With the use of social media around though I screened a trailer for the documentary a month before the documentary came out to get people ready and got some great feedback on the trailer. So the use of social media is very powerful! The this a lot of the interviewees would share the documentary and trailer to their followers, some with 1000s and this once again builds traffic across platforms.

Lastly would be places such as film competitions, although you have to pay to enter a lot of them, getting them screened to other creative people and even other creative people in the industry could easily open doors for you and would a great experience, I personally have also looked into festivals for my documentary to be screened at.

Mark Litwak explains why film festivals are important but not always for all films.

Film markets is something else that I've recently seen

Only three film markets exists in the world, where 1000s of industry executives attend the markets, they operate like any market, you line up and sellers display their product, executives pour through the doors looking for an interesting film.

And what will happen is that they will discuss the film with the seller, arrange to see the film either on DVD or at a private screening and negotiate a price. What what im researching and understanding it's much like how sites like Netflix buy films for their service.

The specialist sellers are called Film Sales Agents and sell your film for a commission.

There's a lot more ways to get it out there but social media is the most powerful and then getting it into films like sundance or any film festival could pick up news media and people writing about your film.