Immersive Filmmaking Calendar 2023–2024: XR Festivals Deadlines
50+ Film Festivals, Markets, Workshops, and more for VR Creators!
This guide (or better say a well organised Google Spreadsheet) is a result of years of experience navigating the growing and eveloving world of XR Film festivals. I’ve started creating this calendar back in 2018 and have diligently updated it to keep it relevant for your needs.
In 2017–2018 it wasn’t that easy to track the festivals with VR in competition or as a special exhibition, as many major film events tried to fit on the VR into their program. Some of them never did more than 1–2 editions, others included VR into main competition and gave spotlight to an emerging media. Our spreadsheets from 2019–2022 were evolving the same way, keeping the track of establish film events as well as new dedicated XR showcases aimed to promote creative XR projects.
Making it as a Google Spreadsheet is still the most simple way to keep it up-to-date, but this year we made quite an impovement (on which we are still working on).
We split the spreadsheet into tabs, separating Film Festivals (meaning the events which have a submission process, selection and physical/virtual showcase), Awards (where the project got nominated and not showcased publicly), Market/Industry/Pitchings (and many of those Film Festivals from the first tab have their Market/Indusry section, so they might be repeating in both tabs but aimed to different parts of the festival). Additionally we are trying to collect data about Educational Labs for VR Creators (again, some of them are happening during Festivals and Markets), Distributors and Funds.
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So…welcome to XR FILM FESTIVALS DEADLINES & BEYOND 2024!
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As you can see from the screenshot, this time we can have a nice filter of the deadlines and all of the events are sorted based on the closest deadline.
The information is not final, for some of the festivals we had to guess the dates of the event and approx. deadline based on the last year information.
Still, that provides quite a great idea when, where and what is going to happen and how much it could cost you to submit there.
The spreadsheet is not final and would be updated by our team.
However, for the festivals and enthusiasts we have made a form where you can provide information about the festivals we’ve missed!
This project is open to public and we hope it might be useful to anyone, whether you’re a seasoned professional or a newcomer in the XR field.
We will post updates in our blog with more details about other sections: Awards, Markets/Industry etc., as well as will write few of the observations about the festival landscape and some of the festival strategies you can apply for your projects. However, it is important to give a first overall idea of what the festival landscape is:
As you can see in the spreadsheet, even in VR field there are different sort of content required by the festival. Major categories are:
- Immersive content (any VR/AR/360 project of any genre and even projects/worlds in Metaverse)
Among the most respected VR events in this category are: Venice Immersive as part of Venice Film Festival, Raindance Immersive, SXSW — South by South West, Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival and many more. - Documentary oriented content
Many documentary film festivals have VR/XR as a part of their competition/non-competitive showcase, and for many traditional creators it is a path to present cross-platform projects with both traditional films and XR project based on the same subject. Among those festivals are IDFA DocLab, One World Human Rights Film Festival,DOK Leipzig, CPH:DOX Inter:Active etc. - Animation oriented content
Well, technically most of interactive projects might be considered animation, but the core is a storytelling, not the technique. So events like Annecy Festival, Animafest Zagreb, Kaboom Animation Festival and other are trying to get the selection with animation storytelling being the center of the work. - 360 content
This one is becoming rare, but that’s not because 360 content doesn’t stand a chance to interactive. It is exactly opposite as 360 content is competiting with Interactive works more and more. However, there are still few festivals with just 360 selection (and Lichter FilmFest is one of them), so that’s a good news for filmmakers who are experimenting with 360 video while still being more on a traditional side of the film.
Of course, there is also a “class” of the festival — reputation, selection, prizes. Even though you can find lots of festivals which shows “VR” on Filmfreeway, not all of them have a verified reputation in the industry, so we’ve tried to add here only those we know in the industry. We’ll cover it in the next articles.
And now about the authors and partners who helped to make it.
And small request from you!
This database was created by Georgy Molodtsov, awarded XR Director (“Oxymore” by Jean-Michel Jarre and “Welcome to the other side” produced by VRROOM; “Under the pillow XR”), Festival Curator (goEast Film Festival Open Frame Award and Lab) and Film XR Founder.
Currently his new project “MormoVerse: Kitten Mormitten”, a VRChat world for kids and beyond (and that’s the most rare target audience in VR and least financially supported one) based on the fairy tale written by his father, is participating in Raindance Immersive 2023. But as these kind of projects are not getting financed and comes out of own pocket, you all can make some good here!
If you find this spreadsheet useful — you can help to fund the polishing and full completition of the project, as we want to reward amazing developers and animators working on this project (not only with eternal fame and respect).
We are figuring out the best way to organise it, but for now PAYPAL sounds most easy one: https://paypal.me/mormotik
THANKS!
And now about parners who already helped a lot to maintain the database:
First one is VRROOM — an entertaining metaverse VR platform, as well as studio behind virtual worlds for goEast, Venice Immersive and SXSW, as well as Webby awarded, PGA nominated “OXYMORE” VR concerts by Jean-Michel Jarre. As we can see from our database, many VR festivals are leaning towards hybrid format, providing both physical experience for festival-goers and virtual event and space for the audience around the globe. So VRROOM’s platform is going to provide more of the spaces like that.
Another partner of this project is XRMUST — at the moment the only online media fully dedicated to creative XR news. This year we added a special columns with the links to materials on xrmust dedicated to the mentioned festivals, as we strongly believe, that in order to decide whether the festival is a fit for your project or your project is a fit for this festival, you should explore more about it, about curators and previous selection. That would give you perfect understanding of the industry and perspectives of your own work (before spending over a $1000 of entry fees to submit to each and every festival in the spreadsheet).
And the last but not the least is EUROMERSIVE — The European Federation of XR Professionals, which provides supports, discounts and information to those who are trying to navigate in this quite new and constantly evolving industry.
Thanks again and send us your comments and ideas!
