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CAA Alumni: Nat's Film Festival Round-up




As an Alumni of CAA (known and CG Arts & Animation whilst I was there) I was asked to do a Round-up of the film & animation festivals my animations/films have been selected and screened at so far to encourage all of you to submit your work to festivals.

We Love Kent (2015) - Freelance Animation for a local App development company.

I made this animation in June 2015 as a Freelance Animator and Director. It's only 20 seconds long and it's an advert so it's harder to put it into the festival circuit as a lot of festivals aren't big on taking on adverts of other businesses, but in my opinion it's still worth filling out the forms to show it's a lovingly crafted piece of artwork. So far, It's been accepted to a festival in Argentina, and one in Italy.




Mothers Days (2014) - 3rd Year Film.

I've recently started entering my grad film into the festival circuit. I was going to hold off from entering this one into any festivals as I plan to re-shoot it, but as time has gone past I can re-watch it and see it as a little animation now rather than a bunch of errors from lack of sleep and rushed time. In the festival circuit the majority of festivals have a rule where the film has to have been made within the last 2 years (some require 1 year) to keep things fresh, so that's a good reason to enter your films and move on to the next project. At the time of writing this post, the film has been accepted to 7 festival screenings, 2 in London, and one in Leeds, Sweden, Italy, Texas and Orlando.



How Winnie Got Her False Teeth - One of my second year projects

This film completed it's festival run and was accepted to 14 festivals around the world including;
8 in the USA, 4 in the UK, 1 in Brazil and 1 in Mexico.


Some festivals send out cool certificates and festival programmes or goodies for you to remember your achievements by. At this stage, the early stage of getting into any festival that is, most festivals don't send out anything, but the bigger the festival (usually they cost more to enter into) the bigger the rewards and goodies. This can easily skint any student or freelancer so just to start getting your name out there, there are hundreds of festivals that are free to enter, so I recommend trying those out first.

The images below are of memorabilia sent out from my very first festival screening for this film which was in Downtown Tyler, Texas, USA. It was great to be in the list for 'Best of the Fest'.




Blind. (2012)

This is a short live-action film a group of us made at the British Film Institute in the summer of 2012 (not UCA related), we didn't know each other before joining this 2 week course.

My roles in this were : Editor, Storyboard Artist, Effects Artist and all of us had a part in Directing it.
I hadn't really known about the festival circuit at this point so it only made it to a couple of festivals by the time I became used to the process of entering into them, but this one's exciting story is that Joe Cornish, co-writer of Tin Tin, Writer & Director of Attack the Block was the guest at this event, and he judged our film as the best short of that event. That certainly was an exciting day.


Last words? Ok….

Get used to the rejection letters. For the many rejections you will receive, the accepted ones will be just that bit more glorious. If you don't enter, then you won't get to experience any of it anyway.

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