Pre-production Planning: Short film Promotion By Holly King

Short Film Promotion:

There are several well known company that promote short films and Review them and also host awards for their favourite short films (competitions). A couple of examples of renounded websites that show short films are:

• Virgin Media
• BBC
• BFI London film Festival
• Empire Magazine Online

BBC Film Network:

Screen Short of the BBC short film Website-Webpage on short film 'The Cull'

• The functions i have highlighted in red show how you can share this video. This is important as it encourages people to share this video and this helps to promote it. People may copy the link to email it to friends, and also there is an 'embed' option which allows people to embed the video onto blogs or example.
• This is a good way of promoting a video and increasing its views as it is so simple to do and can spread so quickly.
• In the blue highlighted area is a function that allows you to create your own film network profile. This is so you can also upload films  to the website and allows you to have an account where you can comment on/rate other films.
• The Green highlighted area shows how by creating an account you can give people feed back on videos, rate the video or comment on it for example. This is a good way of getting feedback on a film.
• There is a section above the comments box, titled 'more from drama'. This box shows films from the same genre as the one you are currently viewing to suggest other films that might appeal to you. This is a good way to promote other films.
• Also by adding tags to your film (such as the genre/key words) when somebody searches this on the film network, your film will appear and so this is a way to make your film more viewed.

Reviews:

• There are many online blogs and pages along with magazines that write film Reviews for short films (such as Empire magazine).
• There are also events where short films can be nominated for awards and screened at a festival. To do this we would have to enter the competition and upload our short film to the website where people will watch it, rate it and vote on which film they think is best, and the most highly rated ones have a chance at winning. I feel this is a good way of promoting a shortfilm and getting it heard of.
• Also if we were to promote out film in a magazine, we know we would be targetting a specific audience and so could choose the magazine accordingly.
• Magazines such as empire are good because the audience buys it, to read reviews of films and they could talk about our film and it may be promoted through word of mouth.