© 2010 YouSendIt. All rights reserved.

Case Study

Encounters Short Film FestivalThe Encounters Short Film Festival, in Bristol, U.K., is one of the world’s most respected celebrations of short films and animation. Annually, the festival solicits entries from filmmakers throughout the United Kingdom and the rest of the world, previews all the entries and selects about 10 percent of them for screenings over five days at the November festival.

The Problems

• Time consuming conversion of films submitted on DVDs to QuickTime formats for pre-selecting and a computer-based digital viewing library at the festival.

• Additional eight-week costs for a staff member and post-production studio to carry out the conversion process.

• DVDsfrequentlylostordelayed in the U.K.’s Royal Mail system.

• Environmentalimpactof discarding some 1,200 DVDs after being converted.

• Expense and potential intellectual-property security problems for filmmakers creating and sending DVDs.

The soluTion

YouSendIt Entrants were encouraged to submit films for the 2009 festival through YouSendIt; half of all entries were received this way. Being able to work directly with QuickTime files instead of DVDs, festival staff cut their pre-selecting and processing time by four weeks, reduced costs and lessened their environmental impact.

Situation and ChallengesThe Encounters Short Film Festival, in Bristol, U.K., is one of the world’s most respected celebrations of short films and animation. Annually, the festival solicits entries from filmmakers throughout the United Kingdom and the rest of the world, previews all the entries and selects about 10 percent of them for screenings over five days at the November festival. The filmmakers have the opportunity to win one of 19 awards and up to £12,500 in prizes.The submission and pre-selection process for the festival had been a tedious operation. EntrantswererequiredtotransfertheirproductionstoDVDandthenmailthemtothefestival office. Postal services in the U.K. were less than reliable, with repeated postal strikesandlostmailresultingindeliveriesthatoccasionallyrequiredmonthstoreachtheir destinations.Once festival officials received the submissions, the process became exceptionally labor intensive. The festival works with a very small staff compared to the other European festivals with which it competes for entrants. In 2009, a total of 1,486 films were entered in the Encounters festival and each of them needed to be viewed in its entirety and evaluated. So that pre-selectors could judge the entries and visitors to the festival could watch all the submitted films at the HP Digital Viewing Library, staff needed to digitize every DVD in real time, encode it and convert it to a QuickTime file. One staff member would spend eight weeks in a commercial post-production studio playing each film and capturing it in real time.Forty industry professionals would then come to the festival office and sit in front of a flat-screen TV to watch the films and pre-select the ones they would send on to the creative director for final programming. Half of the roughly 1,486 entries were passed through in this pre-selection process, and the creative director narrowed them down to just 159 finalists.This process was not only time consuming, but expensive. Filmmakers had to buy DVDs and pay postage, while the festival needed to pay a staff person for two months just to digitize the entries, converting them to computer files. And further, when judges came across a DVD that would not play, it was difficult to arrange for the film to be resubmitted. The methodology also was not as environmentally sound as Encounters Short Film Festival Managing Director Liz Harkman wanted it to be, because the rejected DVDs were just thrown away:“In the U.K., we have to pay to get DVDs recycled,” she explains. “We end up with a large number of DVDs at the end of the festival. It was a huge waste of materials, and wanted to encourage people to stop sending us their films on DVD.” That is when she considered YouSendIt as a way to receive films as digital files instead of on physical DVDs.

Encounters Film FestivalInternational FestivalBritish Film Festival Cuts Screening Time in Half, Slashes Administrative Costs and Helps the Environment with YouSendIt

© 2010 YouSendIt. All rights reserved.

Case Study

“ I’m totally overwhelmed

by the positive response

from the filmmakers, and

this is a definite indication

that we will need to continue

to offer digital uploads

as part of our submission

process. I have also noticed

a dramatic increase in the

proportion of filmmakers

using YouSendIt to send

us files outside of the

submission process.”Liz HarkmanManaging Director

Encounters Short Film Festival

SolutionHarkman was introduced to YouSendIt when she had responsibility for working with designers of print materials who sent her proof copies via YouSendIt. She had not thought about using it for sending film or video, however, until a meeting in March, 2009, with Nik Powell, director of Britain’s National Film and Television School in London. “He had just received an e-mail from a filmmaker we were talking about,” she recalls. “He simply downloaded the draft of the short film from YouSendIt while we were in his office, and that made me think: Why can’t we do that with the festival?”She tried out YouSendIt with an eye toward offering it as an alternative method for sending in film entries. “I had no idea we would be able to make it such an embedded part of our submission program,” she says. “It wasn’t a separate operation; it became very much a part of our submission process.”For the 2009 festival, Harkman’s marketing materials offered a £5 discount from the £20 entry fee for all films that were submitted as digital QuickTime files via YouSendIt, instead of using the traditional DVD method. Nearly half of the entries, 712 films were sent to the festival through YouSendIt by filmmakers, who found the process much faster, more reliable and less costly than DVDs.With YouSendIt, the festival was able to bypass much of the eight-week pre-screening time because staff no longer had to transfer DVDs to digital QuickTime files in real time. The films were received as QuickTime files from the start.

Encounters Film FestivalInternational FestivalBritish Film Festival Cuts Screening Time in Half, Slashes Administrative Costs and Helps the Environment with YouSendIt

© 2010 YouSendIt. All rights reserved.

Case Study

Results• Afaster,streamlinedprocess.With half the entries arriving through YouSendIt as

QuickTime files, the festival was able to cut its digitizing time by 50 percent and work on the remaining DVDs in its own office instead of renting a commercial studio. As a result, festival staff members were able to provide the submissions to the pre-selection team two months earlier than they had in the past. Moreover, it was easy to pass the approved films on to the creative director each day in batches, instead of waiting until the end of the pre-selection process. “Pre-selection changed from being very laborious to a very streamlined process,” Harkman says. “The entire process became automated, and selecting the films became so much easier.”

• Costandtimesavings. The festival gained a significant amount of administrative savings. “The previous year,” Harkman says, “we had to employ an extra person to do the digitizing, eight hours a day. We didn’t need to do that in 2009. We saved money on staff and managed it with volunteers.” Harkman estimates YouSendIt saved administrative staff about four weeks of work.

• Betterquality.ThequalityofthefilmsbeingscreenedattheHPDigitalViewingLibrary was improved significantly. Typically, when films were digitized from DVDs, subtitles became difficult to read, but they were sharp when transferred to digital QuickTime files and transmitted through YouSendIt. The problem of corrupted files on DVDs was eliminated. If an electronic file did have a flaw, it was a simple task to contact the filmmaker and have the file resent with YouSendIt.

• Agreeneroperation.The festival became more environmentally conscious because it was dealing with only half as many DVDs, now that the other half were sent electronically. This meant that far fewer DVDs would end up in landfills, or that the festival would not have to pay to recycle as many DVDs.

• Moresecuredelivery. The filmmakers came to realize that their creative work was more secure with YouSendIt than on a DVD. “Anyone can copy a DVD and send it around the world,” Harkman points out. “With YouSendIt, people have control over where their films are going, rather than having them land in just anyone’s hands or on a shelf.” Harkman plans to encourage 2010 entrants to send more of their films digitally through YouSendIt by retaining the discounted £15 fee for these electronic entries and raising the fee for entries on DVD.

“We managed to deliver something never done before,” she notes, “something very few other festivals offer, by allowing filmmakers to submit their work electronically.”

YouSendIt,Inc.1919 S.Bascom Ave., 3rd Floor Campbell, CA 95008866.55U.SENDsales@yousendit.com www.yousendit.com

Encounters Film FestivalInternational FestivalBritish Film Festival Cuts Screening Time in Half, Slashes Administrative Costs and Helps the Environment with YouSendIt