Withoutabox is the leader of its market so, as usual, its service/software is not at the state of the art and the prices are not so low but you can really reach a good number of festivals and you can avoid sending DVDs, that is very important for me… so this is my “must have” list to choose a festival on WAB – or on other services of its kind – based on what I learnt by trial and error:

• it accepts Secure Online Screener: I don’t want to send DVDs outside Italy; their private streaming service for festivals, or other equivalent services, should be the standard way of screening candidates. We are in 2012! Streaming is cheaper, safer, faster and simpler than sending a DVD… unfortunately, many festivals in Italy and abroad still require DVDs even for the first step: asking a DVD/Blu-Ray/File is fine for the real projection during the festival, but nowadays asking a DVD just to be selected is simply annoying;
• search information about a festival before submitting to it: googling about websites that point to it might be a good step; does this festival has some kind of “ranking”? Is its level too low for your short/feature film or, the other way around, is it over your head: ask yourself questions of this kind;
• check if they have a good website: I’m not talking about web design :) I’m talking about information about the current and the previous editions – learning something about their admission rate and numbers is good to know if it worths to submit. AFAIK, 5% is the most common admission percentage.

By the way: at the moment, my short film Déjà Vu is going through its “festival period” and it has been admitted, in Ireland, to Corona Fastnet Short Film Festival and, in Italy, to VideoFestival City of Imperia, while – also in Italy, it has been screened on Coming Soon Television… touch wood. :)

• the lap dance scene performed by Barbara Bouchet is still sexy forty years later: in 1972 it should have blasted the audience… there are even two very interesting and unexpected rotated shots showing the floor on the vertical left side of the screen;
• about camera movements, zooming is quite rare nowadays but they used it a couple of times at least;
• lines regarding connections between crime and finance from a political/systemic point of view is quite rare too and, though a bit outdated, that’s very good;
• unfortunately, few, small cars and “navigli” canals are something you hardly can find in the Milan of our time.

IMHO, the core of his lucid and powerful prose is:

consciousness is an illimitable power

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Credits to Maurizio.

• Screwed up at least four relationships;
• got a MsC degree;
• established three companies;
• visited four continents (yes, me too); :)
• became father;
• wrote and directed a short film

…and I still listen to Drake too much.

There is a lot of good advice on the Internet: let me add here a few naive hints. :)

• I had just one day to shoot so I previously wrote a detailed script and created many tables that group takes (with their length and the like) in scenes, scenes in sets etc.: it won’t be enough but it helps. Of course, during the day, I changed things – and their order – a few times but a film is a project, right? Your film crew is like a team (twelve people in my case) and I’m an engineer in real life so being a producer/director is not that far from being a project manager. :) I supposed that eleven hours would have been enough: I was wrong. It took fifteen hours, and you can’t stop the sun, of course. :) But we completed what I had planned: imagine what would have happened without a good schedule.
• Even a simple make-up requires more than half an hour for an actress and a few minutes less for an actor: that’s a lot of time that you have to count in your time table. The setting up of the camera and the sound take time too but these are easy to understand.
• Special effects: that’s post production, of course, but try to keep the number of VFXs as low as possible.
• Find a good cinematographer: he helped me more than what I’d have expected from a DOP… being smart, fast and creative is essential. :) Your two arms are, first, the DOP and, later, the Editor. :)
• The story is the core but a good camera, lights, location and many other things can make the difference: they are not cheap but if you want to try to be admitted to some festival around the world, even if you are not a real producer, I’m sorry but you have to spend a bit of money. :)

Then, don’t forget a few rules taken from a previous post. :)