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It Could Happen - Festivals

Showtime - Your epic is finally done. The color corrections you meticulously crafted are perfect, and the audio tracks in the edit timeline are speckled with fades and dissolves - evidence of a carefully-blended soundtrack. You click on Save As and rip the project to DVD. It's showtime.

Rambunctious friends and relatives, even the family dog, gather in front of the digital hearth for your premiere. As they're hooting and hollering and throwing popcorn, you dare to wonder if there might be larger audiences in grander places who might appreciate your opus.

Try to imagine a packed nineteenth-century theater where Mark Twain once gave a speech, and it's your movie flickering up there on the digital silver screen. When the credits go up, there's applause and questions about your film. During the schmooze-fest afterwards, a sales agent comes up to you and says she might be able to find a buyer for your movie. It could happen. But you have to work for it.

Filmfests: Why Not?

Without an audience, your movie is like the proverbial hand clapping in the forest. How does anybody know it exists? If you're genuinely serious about finding an audience for your film, you have to stop thinking that finishing the movie is the end of your labors.

One of the best things you can do for your film and for your own development as a filmmaker is to have your movie screened at one of the several hundred festivals that dot the North American landscape.

Festivals can do three things for you: deliver audiences for your film, connect you to the industry marketplace and provide learning opportunities for improving your craft. Before launching into the do's and don'ts of getting your film past programmers and screeners and in front of festival audiences, we should first pan across the terrain to explore what kinds of festival experiences are out t…