Festivals have gotten a lot accepting of various digital formats in recent years. Many festivals will accept a Blu Ray disc for exhibition purposes, and you can make those pretty easily with Adobe Encore (part of the Creative Cloud suite you can rent for a fairly low monthly fee) and a $50 blu ray burner. The discs themselves are maybe $1.50 a disc these days.

The really picky festivals might go so far as to request a Digital Cinema Package (DCP) which, with a little ingenuity, is also is also possible to create on a budget.

For what it's worth, you only would need to make these HD copies for the festivals your film is accepted to. Right now pretty much everybody still uses DVDs or digital uploads for the judging process that takes place beforehand. You can find a lot of the major festivals on FilmFreeway and that site allows free, high quality uploads through Vimeo or their own service for the judging process. Alternately there is Withoutabox, which has far more festivals registered but is a far inferior service because they had a monopoly for about a decade and never made any effort to offer a good service because of this.

This is exciting. I was misinformed by someone I know IRL that it costs many many thousands of dollars and many many hours to render a film that would be accepted by film festivals. Now I need to check if he invented the time machine and if he'd just came back from the past.

I've identified a group of filmmakers who have attended film exchanges before and I am designing a survey for them to study if there were any gaps in their experiences participating in that exchange. This survey may be extended to brickfilmers as well in stages just to gauge interests levels, preferences, working styles and production budgets. I may be given a smaller budget to work with in the initial stages to make a proof of concept though that is still a bit too early to tell. Hopefully, if this program gets off the ground, it would be something that participants and funders can design together.

Me too. I've wanted to buy your DVDs from before but I am half way around the world from the US currently so if I buy now, I am mostly just paying for shipping costs. Once I am in Chicago, I'll hit you up again and you can ship to me there. I'll be able to save up on a lot of shipping costs that way.

Thanks for the info.

I think I may know where to get information regarding demographics of attendees to various film festivals. Maybe I can look at that and then target film festivals with audiences that this project would appeal to.

Yah, maybe I should have done that first.

This is very helpful, thanks.

Actually, I've never done this with filmmakers before so there may be a learning curve involved for the coordinating secretariat, the participants and the funders. Might be a better idea to start small and target smaller festivals for the first round.

But if it comes to making the final product into DCP 4K or 2K, I'll keep that in mind.

That's a very good point. I am planning for this to be a participant-led program so ideally if we could fly all participants to the same location to storyboard, nominate a director or editor, for workshops etc that would be great. I think funders would also want to provide input at various production stages.

I was thinking of how an ensemble piece would work as well. Say all the brickfilmers are given the same theme and they have to make their own segments of the film. One idea I had in my head was about a rolling stud that rolls off and on into a scene. The goal for every participant involved would be to create a scene of how the stud would roll onto their set, what would happen to it and how the stud could roll out of their set into the set of another participant from a different country. So for an idea like this, the participants would have to be in the same location (or even teleconferencing maybe?) to storyboard, to make sure they are not making scenes based on the same ideas and who gets to do which scene.

So for that to happen, each participant would be responsible for the post-production for his/her own scenes. Anyways, I was also told that forcing these structures on filmmakers will not provide them with a conducive environment to work in. So I am gathering all these different ideas now so that hopefully at the workshop stage, at least one of them can go into development. Or maybe in the brainstorming session, someone can come up with even a better idea.

I was also informed, voice acting might not be a good idea because of language barriers. I will be collecting best practices from film exchange projects soon while sharing sample ideas and models with would-be participants just to get feedback.

I am still not able to come up with ideas for a plot-based piece with a main protagonist and events within that piece that will lead to climaxes and denouements that can be done by brickfilmers in different locations. Also, I am just researching at random at the moment, once I put my mind into it, I think I might stumble upon something that could work for everyone.