4 Valuable Lessons Learned From Hosting Virtual Film Festivals
The show must go on! As many festivals have started to go virtual, it creates new opportunities and challenges for festival organizers. From our experiences partnering with the NYC Indie Film Festival and the JustUs Film Festival (that we put together in 3 weeks -read about it here), we aggregated our lessons in this article that can be beneficial in helping other film festivals.
1) Licensing
The first and most significant potential problem area to understand is licensing. You will have to consider the apprehension that filmmakers will have that if their film streams live, they might lose possible distribution deals. A suggested route we offer is to use a license that:
- Only covers streaming live in a minimal period and not on-demand
- Is transactional in revenue only
This license will not conflict rights that most distributors acquire, which is video-on-demand. Live streams that are transactional in their business model fall in a grey of distribution, and which can potentially put your filmmakers and distributors at ease.
2) Estimating Ticket Sales & Early Bird Pricing
If you are used to hosting events, you know about the “bell curve.” It’s when the majority of people suddenly buy their tickets days before the event occurs. Like any event, Film Festivals are accustomed to experiencing a bell curve as well, but virtual events have made the bell curve more extreme.
In both virtual festivals we hosted, the majority of ticket sales occurred not 1–2 days before the screening, but 1 to 2 hours before the screening. Being at home enables people to make their purchase decision at the literal last minute! Don’t be nervous if you’re a day out, and your ticket sales are not at the expected goal.
In the JustUs Film Festival, we did increase the early buying of tickets by having an early-bird ticket price. With early-bird ticket sales, we caused about ⅓ of our tickets to sell early. Not huge, but if you feel more comfortable with pre-sales, that tactic will help.
3) Being On-Time & Refund Policy
It is important to convey to attendees that online screening will be on time. There is no setting up the projector, checking the sound system, or the usual mishaps during in-person screenings. We’ve found many attendees will show up 5 to 15 minutes late and sometimes entirely missing films if they are shorts. It’s essential to stress punctuality.
When someone shows up late or misses the entire screening, the next question will be, for a refund. You must have a strict refund policy in place for these situations. It will make handling disputes a lot easier.
4) Panel Discussions
Both the filmmakers and the audience love to be interactive and participate in discussions about the films. The best example is when we screened Push Out at the Justice Film Festival. The panel ended up canceling, and the audience put together a panel of their own after the movie.
We developed our technology to focus on making it easy to host panels. Instead of switching between platforms, we allow the filmmakers to start a virtual panel, and the audience can chat questions.
Applying Our Lessons
To summarize for festival organizers, the biggest takeaway from our virtual festivals are:
- Have a licensing strategy that will not conflict with distributors
- Be able to provide some level of protection against copyright theft of content
- Be prepared for a lot of last-minute ticket sales
- Offer virtual panel discussions
BingeWave exists to address the requirements through its technological approach and designed for small, resource-limited teams. Potentially, they could be of use to your festival’s needs as well. And as this article began, so shall end with, the show must go on, whether online or offline.
BingeWave is live streaming, community building and revenue generation platform for filmmakers. We serve everyone from web series, documentaries to features, and champion diverse narratives.
For information on hosting your own festival or obtaining distribution, please visit: https://distribution.bingewave.com/
