If you're a regular reader you'll be aware that work featured on Short of the Week sometimes makes its way to our pages. In fact, if you spend anytime at all watching shorts online, it's highly likely that SotW co-founder & Vimeo staff curator Jason Sondhi was (in)directly responsible for some of that work making its way to you. As filmmakers looking to find an audience for your work, I'm sure there are several questions you'd love to put to Jason, both in his curatorial role and as a producer who launched The Thomas Beale Cipher to 170K online views (now over 500K). Well, during a recent stop in Québec at the REGARD festival, Jason sat down for a 25 minute chat about his work at SotW and Vimeo:
Unfortunately the embed appears to have gone private, but the full interview can still be watched here.
There's a lot of insightful information in there, but some of the key elements that stuck out for me as someone who spends a lot of his time curating were:
- Upload a trailer and set a clear release date.
- Don't set that date over the weekend.
- Actually think about it as a launch; get everyone you can behind it in those initial stages.
- Reach out to sites/individuals with an established audience.
- Make sure the film's description and (especially) thumbnail are enticing.
I would also add, make yourself easy to find and painless to cover; have a website, update your contact info, provide stills, write production notes and director's statements. You may have made the world's greatest short, but if people can't get hold of you or find everything they need to write up an article, your film will become nothing more than a pleasantly fading memory and last I checked, memories don't generate views.
What would you have asked Jason if given the chance?
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