IEEE Spectrum July, 2012 - 24

YouTube'S Your film feSTiVal
google puts short films on the Web-
and sundance on notice

G

etting into a film
festival today is like
getting into college,
only harder. Even Ivy League
schools have acceptance rates
higher than the 2 percent
that's quoted on the Sundance
Film Festival's website.
A new online festival
of short films-the Your
Film Festival, organized
by Google's YouTube-may
not prove less exclusive
than Sundance. But it does
drastically cut the cost
of screening films. And
anyone with a broadband
24

connection can attend. Just
go to http://www.youtube.
com/yourfilmfestival
to watch all the YFFapproved entries, and many
rejected ones as well.
The general public was
invited to submit entries
for free, up to 15 minutes in
length, by 31 March. Ridley
Scott's London-based
Scott Free Production Co.,
a partner in YFF, culled
50 semifinalists from a
field of more than 15 000.
Public voting on the
semifinalists, which began

NA * iEEE SpEctrum * july 2012

1 June, will close 13 July. A
permissive policy-one vote
per film per IP address per
day-will undoubtedly have
entrants pestering friends
and family to vote daily.
The top 15 vote-getting
filmmakers will be flown
to the Venice Film Festival
in September, where their
works will be screened.
The top vote getter, to be
announced at the festival, will win a US $500 000
grant to make a film with
Scott Free. All 50 semifinalist films will be available on
a special Your Film Festival
on-demand in-flight channel on Emirates Airlines.
Although YouTube
encouraged YFF entrants
to post their submissions on
the site as publicly viewable
and searchable videos, it
also recognized that many
festivals won't touch a film
that has already been released
in any way. Thus many
submissions to YFF came
in either as private video
uploads or as unlisted public
uploads. (Unlisted entries on
YouTube have no keywords,
descriptions, or other
indexed text and thus are
effectively undiscoverable.)
"There is this traditional
sense that people have had
that there are gatekeepers to
the film industry," says Nate
Weinstein, entertainment
marketing manager at
YouTube. "And if you don't
put your content through
those gatekeepers, then you're
squandering an opportunity."
Many filmmakers, though,
are happy to have their works
viewed. "They've really
opened it up to everyone,"
says Thomas Price, an ani-

mator and filmmaker based
in Nanango, Australia, who
had previously submitted his short film Paradise
to another festival, which
rejected it. "It's a free platform. That's pretty incredible when you think about it."
A wordless story about
a kind of stygian journey beyond death, Paradise is
a visually arresting live-action
short by any standard. In its
first month on the YFF site-
six weeks before YouTube
announced its 50 semifinalists-the film had been viewed
at least 6400 times-far more
than any other first-round
film festival submission
would have garnered.
Then, too, it's vastly
cheaper submitting to YFF
than to traditional festivals. Reed Martin, author
of The Reel Truth: Everything
You Didn't Know You Need
to Know About Making an
Independent Film (Faber and
Faber, 2009), says that transferring just a 10-minute HD
video to 35-mm film can cost
upward of $5000. Uploading
the video to YouTube's
servers is essentially free.
Martin says that YFF
joins a larger continuum
of online venues-such as
CreateSpace, SnagFilms,
and Vimeo-where emerging filmmakers can gain crucial exposure for minimal
expense. "What's going to be
the catalyst for seeing more
of this stuff is somebody who
cracks the code of making a
TiVo for the Internet," Martin
says. "Somewhere you can
navigate all the stuff that's on
offer and you can realize the
dream of the audience of one."
-Mark Anderson
spectrum.ieee.org

glueKIt

geek life
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum July, 2012
