Austin Texas is the place to be next week with the South by Southwest Music, Internet and Film Festival. Better known as SXSW, beginning on the 9th, people from all over the world will join together for a fabulously good time with great music and inspiring movies.

Besides the Festival events cinematographers will have the chance to attend several meet-n-greet events and seminars. Nikon is partnering with The Bui Brothers who are going to be running a session on how to shoot a music video. What’s cool is that it will incorporate Nikon’s latest gear – the D800 and D4 – and will feature a live band, a local group from Austin called The Statesboro Revue.

The check out MAXON’s free show. Motion graphics company MAXON along with Austin Motion Graphics Meetup is sponsoring a free event with presentations from motion graphics rockstars Nick Campbell and TRON: Legacy VFX artist, David Lewandowski.

NewTek will be delivering many of the live events through their awesome live production and streaming process at the event and to the web with broadcasts of SXSW itself along with the  John Lennon Educational Tour Bus, Gibson Guitars, GeekBeat Live and TechCrunch.

The festival started in 1987 as a music festival to draw headliners to the eclectic music scene in the middle of Texas. In 1994 they added film and interactive elements and the SXWS has become one of the major film festivals to show, attend see and be seen on the levels of Sundance Film Festival, the Chicago International  Film Festival and Cannes in France.

Many films have their debut screening at SXWS before moving on to other festivals and, for the hopeful, commercial success.

Among this year’s films are 8 documentary films competing from more than 800 submissions, 8 narrative features from more than 900 submissions as well as a showing of festival favorites from other premiere, animated, documentary and narrative shorts, and what looks like a fun event: “Midnighters” – scary, funny or controversial movies playing for a night owl crowd.

To find out more about the many film festivals nationwide and a few throughout the world, check out Videomaker‘s Festivals and Event page: http://www.videomaker.com/community/festival/. If you are having an event, festival or contest, or knw of one not lsited, you can add that yourself – we welcome all entries, our mission is toe spread the word for video producers to find new places to showcase their work. Learn about entering festivals here: www.videomaker.com/article/14945 and find out what the judges are looking for in video contests here: http://www.videomaker.com/article/12760/
The SXSW festival runs March 9th through the 17th and it’s not too late to register , although access to all events will hit you at more than a thousand dollars, you can still get tickets to the Film Festival for $595. (Of course, accommodations might be difficult if you haven’t booked yet!)

Believe it or not, the iPhone Film Festival requires that your film be shot entirely with an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. Many other contests make it very clear what the general restriction is for the contest, and while these confines won’t reach Android users, the work that iPhone users put in is exceptional. The real prize in any film festival is the screening of your film and being able to see those of your competitors. Prizes are still nice though, and so far, the iPhone Film Festival has awarded prizes that are valued less than $1,500, but the 2012 festival is scheduled for at least one prize at $2,000. A win here certainly offsets the cost of production, even a third place prize from the iPhone Film Festival equals the cost of an iPhone 4.

There is plenty of space for big film festival ideas if you want to push the limits to earn a win – the rules are simple and leave a lot of room for creativity. The categories are also fairly simple, including cinematography, documentary, feature, series, short film and  music video. There were five awards in each of the previous iPhone Film Festivals with cinematography and music video being the only separate categories – all other videos, feature, short, documentary, and animation competed for first, second and third. For the third iPhone Film Festival, the categories have been shuffled to join cinematography and documentary, then feature, short and series make up a second category, with music video holding up a third.  Ruben Kazantsev and Renata Rinyu are the founders of the festival and love to  focus on community. The festival is still quite young, and counting down to the appearance at MacWorld, and maybe next year’s winners will include an animated film or Siri.

If you have plans for your own entry,  Oct. 1 is the cutoff for IFF4.

A British taxi dispatcher is getting a lot of attention at the international Cannes Festival in France this week with his amazingly low-budget movie about zombies, of all subjects. How low budget? Try $70. Director Marc Price begged and borrowed most of the gear to make his movie, “Colin”. He pleaded with friends to appear for free, and taught himself special effect editing in his spare time while working nights at the taxi company. So don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t make it with low-budget equipment… if a story engages an audience, it doesn’t matter how it was made or how much it cost. Take THAT over-paid Hollywood moguls! The people have spoken.

As for the rest of you, maybe this story will inspire you to use this three-day Memorial Weekend for something creative… who knows, maybe next year we’ll see YOU at Cannes.