Edinburgh and beyond

As I mentioned in my previous post, last week I attended the Edinburgh International Film Festival. As I was there with a short film that I made (called Hungerford: Symphony of a London Bridge) I had a filmmaker’s pass, which allowed me access to the delegate centre and industry events. I’ve written at length about my experiences at the festival over on my personal blog, so I won’t go into details here, but I will just quickly talk about the festival from a Life Just Is perspective. While at the festival I met a lot of great people and I was able to promote the film to them, but beyond that there were also many people who might be able to help realise the project in a more direct way. Networking at a festival like Edinburgh offers a lot of opportunities which other networking events don’t, and this is partly to do with the fact that everyone there is serious enough about filmmaking to pay for a pass, or is making films of a high enough quality to get them shown in a major festival. Also, the printed Who’s Who Guide is an incredible resource and we’ve managed to get interest in the film from people in the guide who we’ve contacted since the festival. Whether anything will come from any of this interest remains to be seen, but it’s a nice avenue to have open for us to explore. Other opportunities created by the festival for the film included a one-to-one session with the Head of Development at Film4 and an individual session with a panel of industry experts. Obviously both of these sessions offered a great opportunity to get advice about the project and help make people from within the industry aware of what we’re doing. In short, I would highly recommend that filmmakers attempting to get a feature off the ground attend a festival like Edinburgh.

- Alex.