Reap the benefits of sending your music videos to film festivals

Jesse Clegg fest master.

But music videos have been a great creative outlet for filmmakers since MTV started in the early 80’s. A lot of today’s film techniques and technologies were originally tried out by music video directors. The Coen Brothers might have been the first feature filmmakers to use digital colour grading but music video filmmakers had been pioneering the technology for years before that.

As a long-time music video director, I hadn’t considered sending my music videos into film festivals until the start of 2017. Over the years I also made short and feature films that were submitted to festivals, but this became very costly. Not only the $30-$50 entry fees but also the international postage and shipping costs from South Africa. Luckily these days we have online delivery and upload methods from sites like www.filmfreeway.com or www.withoutabox.com.

At the beginning of 2017, I discovered that a lot of the film festivals on Filmfreeway accept music videos. There are over 5,000 international festivals that can be entered using this platform. All you need to do is create a profile for your project and then start entering. To my surprise there are a lot of festivals that are either free or less than $5 to enter. A lot of them also accept music videos made in the past 5 years.

What makes it unique

Armed with 2 music videos I had done the previous year, one for Jesse Clegg ft. Shekhinah and one for The Kiffness ft. Tawanna Shaunte, I entered free festivals all over the world. With The Kiffness I could specifically enter themed festivals as the video conveys a strong LGBT story. Look at your project, break it down into what makes it unique and enter it into the relevant festivals.

Since the start of 2017, The Kiffness video has been selected for 13 different festivals around the world, from the UK to Russia, Italy and the USA. It’s been a semi-finalist at two festivals, a finalist at another and won a Special Mention at the India Music Video Awards.

The Jesse Clegg video has been a semi-finalist at two festivals and has been officially accepted to four festivals in total.

Having work screened all over the world for a wide audience to appreciate is a great feeling, but having access to potential clients and bands on a global scale is a huge plus as well. Sure, the videos are available on Youtube or Vimeo, but with so much content out there it’s really something special when people comment saying that they like your work and would never have found it if it wasn’t for a film festival.

Enter into all the free festivals first and see how you do and then pick a few other festivals under $10 – it’s an excellent way to get your work out to the people who really appreciate it!