So, You Filmed Your Short, Now What?

When you wrap your short film shoot, you feel so accomplished.  However, that joy doesn't last long because this is when the real work starts.  Especially if you are doing this uber low budget without the luxury of a fancy-pants editor.

I know what you are thinking: yeah, yeah, yeah, editing takes a long time, etc.  Oh, no, before you can even dream of starting to edit your masterpiece you must label - all those days of footage (and you will soon regret all those Take 30s) every one of them must be labeled.

Okay, now that it's labeled you can start to build your movie, right?  Wrong!  Before that you must sync all that sound.  I don't know if you've ever synced sound, but it is pretty much the most tedious job you'll ever do.  You will start to want to murder the director for always yelling cut so much.

Great!  Now that you've spent days prepping your footage you get to finally start editing.  Yay!  You are thrilled because you know all those takes you did are going to be gems.  Slowly you start to piece scenes together and you realize there is no such thing as a perfect take.  In this one the acting is amazing ... but the focus is soft.  This one is perfectly clear, the acting is decent, but the actor has their glass in the wrong hand and it won't match the other shots.  This one is 100% perfect if only your neighbor hadn't started mowing his lawn halfway through.

Don't worry because it will eventually start to come together and you'll find the shots and you will finish it.  But, now you've spent weeks and weeks staring at all the footage so you know every flaw and the idea of actually watching it in front of other people will make you nauseous.  But it's done - mostly.  You still need to fix up the sound, add effects or a soundtrack, which if you don't know how to do yourself costs a lot of money.  In my case I spent twice on sound editing than I did on the entire budget of the short to begin with.

Now you have your film that you've spent months working on.  Yay for you!  Okay, great, now what?  Do you post it online and hope it goes viral, do you do the film festival thing and hope Harvey Weinstein sees it and wants to make you the next Matt Damon? 

I chose the Film Festival route with my film, All You Need.  And here is something you don't think about: film festivals are expensive.  So, there is an extra couple hundred bucks not considered in the original budget.  Also, how do you chose which ones to submit to?  The big ones where you have a chance of getting seen by big people or the small ones that you have a shot at getting into?

I don't know the answers.  I submitted to bigger ones and will see how that goes.  If it doesn't go well then I guess I will try the smaller ones.  I am up for any suggestions you guys have on places to submit my film to.