Tag Archives: remember you can die from exposure

Festivals for Web Series

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Once upon a time, one way to attract attention to your independent film was to exhibit it on the festival circuit.

The idea was that appreciative audiences would prove your film’s worth to distributors who would then pay you to buy your film.

Fast forward to today. There are thousands of films being made each year. Sundance receives over 12,000 submissions and can show only 185.

Okay. So let’s make a web series instead.

We still face the same problems: how to attract an audience and how to get paid.

Enter festivals exclusively for web series.

The excellent CMF Trends has just published a listing of 45 festivals for web series.

“Given the perpetually increasing offer of quality productions, ‘discoverability’ remains one of the main challenges that webseries creators face. What can creators do to make sure their projects stand out from the competition? Among the options that are available to them, they may enter their work in national and international competitions.”

This list includes:

  • 12 in Canada
  • 14 in the United States
  • 13 in Europe
  • 3 in Asia and Oceania
  • 3 in Latin America

The big winner seems to be Montreal with six!

My take: how do you show a web series at a festival? Binge watch all ten webisodes?

Webseries format matures

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Alexandre Pierrin writes in CMF Trends that “Webseries Emerge From the Shadows“.

He points to more web platforms betting on webseries and pouring serious money into their production.

The motivation seems to be capturing mobile viewers with time to kill.

“Millennials are without a doubt the largest consumers of web-based videos. They represent a prime target for television channels seeking to rejuvenate their audiences as well as for major corporations in search of new customers. The Media Technology Monitor estimates that, during the fall of 2016, 80% of Canadians aged 15 to 34 used their smartphone to watch online videos. It’s actually smartphones, and not PCs or tablets, that represent the most commonly used devices by these young adults to view videos on the web.”

One takeaway is that “the 10 x 10-minute format already seems to have become the norm”.

Here’s a list of 2016’s best webseries. Glad to see Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee on it.

My take: certainly, making a series of 10-minute shorts on a shoestring and uploading them to Youtube requires a good idea and a lot of gumption to get it all done. Harder still is attracting an audience to watch. That’s why I’m slightly sceptical about webseries. (For instance, I saw The Guild on Netflix.) But if you do make it online, be wary of bad deals on TV. By the way, my son was making his webseries, Fast Forward Cooking, five years ago.