The results for Babelgum’s 2nd annual film festival were posted two days ago, and we were very excited to find that (for the second year in a row) we are finalist! The first year the contest wasn’t very competitive – it felt like, I think, a lot of filmmakers hadn’t yet heard of it. But this year it was much more popular and the climb to the top 10 was a lot more difficult.
I wanted to take a moment to stress the importance of focused campaigning. Most film sites have a lot of links branching off into a lot of areas of the project. Our sidebar alone has around 20 links, half of which take a person off the main production blog and to other sites all-together.
We have a handful of ideas for upcoming t.minus campaigns, and like I mentioned earlier in the week, they aren’t contest related. We plan on coming up with collaborative projects that tie into the film or episodes, and are confident now that t.minus is the best way to go about them. The focused site could be used to plan a digg event, raise a smaller amount of money for a specific part of the project, give away a limited supply of swag or work-in-progress DVDs, a sudden boost in film request to reach a number more attractive to DIY-friendly theaters. Et cetera.
By having a branch of your film’s site that does one thing and does it well – as opposed to linking to a post that is surrounded by sidebar links and recent entries – we were able to really focus the site’s traffic (from other people’s tweets) and have one main goal for visitors.
The final results for the film fest will be decided near the end of the month by a panel of judges and eventually Spike Lee. Keep your fingers crossed for us – and in the meantime, we have lots of other work to do!
