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Film Festival Secrets 2.0

Atlanta, Georgia |

Film-related Business, Filmmaker Resource

Christopher Holland

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Green Light

This campaign raised $11,340 for production. Follow the filmmaker to receive future updates on this project.

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Mystified by film festivals? Research for the 2nd edition of the book “Film Festival Secrets” is underway and will include live Q&A with festival directors and veteran filmmakers. Join the community that will learn the secrets before they’re written down with early access to webinars and content!

About The Project

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  • The Story
  • Wishlist
  • Updates
  • The Team
  • Community

The Story

There's a lot about the world of film festivals that will never change. Audiences still show up to watch movies in the dark with their fellow film lovers, and they're still thrilled to meet the creators of those movies at their local film festivals. 

 
Accordingly, there are parts of the first edition of "Film Festival Secrets" that will stand the test of time.
 
However, there are other bits of the book that really show their age. (That mention of MySpace in the marketing chapter, for instance, really has to go.) 
 
Just as the book itself must change, however, I think it's important to learn more about the ways filmmakers like you enter the festival circuit, what you want from the experience, and how you can better take advantage of what it has to offer. The best way to do that is not to lock myself away during the writing process, but to invite you to be part of the journey.
 
I'm looking forward to getting to know a new community of filmmakers and their work as the new edition of "Film Festival Secrets" takes shape.
 

Wishlist

Use the WishList to Pledge cash and Loan items - or - Make a pledge by selecting an Incentive directly.

Cash Pledge

Costs $0

Sound Designer

Costs $150

Everything sounds better with a little audio sweetening by Auphonic.

Adobe Creative Cloud

Costs $450

Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign are the tools of the publishing trade.

Webinar Service

Costs $1,200

To allow everyone to be able to attend webinars I’ll need to upgrade my webinar service.

Cover Design

Costs $500

A new edition deserves a new cover.

Music Licensing

Costs $500

Tunes to go before, after, and in between people talking on the podcast.

G-Technology® Hard Drive ($300)

Costs $300

G-Technology® is the gold standard for storage solutions specifically designed for content creators. We’ll get a storage grant from them when we get the Green Light!

Podcast Production

Costs $2,500

Scheduling guests, recording, editing, etc.

Book Editing & Layout

Costs $400

Completing the language, look, and feel of the finished product.

Book Writing

Costs $2,000

Collation of information and writing to create the 2nd edition of the book.

Flights

Costs $1,500

I’d like to record on the ground at a festival or two.

About This Team

I've been working in film for about twenty years, first as one of the early internet movie bloggers (long before the term was invented) on a site I co-founded and co-wrote with my college roommate, Scott Hamilton. (Not that Scott Hamilton.) Stomp Tokyo (stomptokyo.com) was written up in the New York Times and Entertainment weekly as a "trash movie paradise" and eventually we published a compendium of our reviews as a book titled "Reel Shame: Bad Movies and the Hollywood Stars Who Made Them."

 
Upon moving to Austin, Texas I started working directly with film festivals (the Austin Film Festival at first) and for a hybrid distribution/tech startup called B-Side Entertainment. B-Side was ahead of its time (and sadly is no more), but it was there that I got my education in building an audience and in how festivals really work. I became acquainted with more than two hundred festival directors and got a broad survey of how film festivals large and small operated -- and how they saw themselves.
 
Armed with this knowledge and with interviews from dozens of festival staffers and filmmakers, I published the first edition of "Film Festival Secrets" and began consulting with individual filmmakers on their festival strategy and film marketing/distribution plans. 
 
Seven years and 300+ clients later, I've watched the world change and the industry change along with it. There's a lot more I've learned about the way indie film works and I'm eager to get that knowledge down in the pages of a new edition of "Film Festival Secrets."

Current Team

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