You're a Filmmaker
Yes you are! A remarkable thing has happened to the audio-visual medium in the last decade or so: DIGITAL.
Before, filmmaking was the reserve of film and TV studios with prohibitively expensive equipment, film stock costs, and huge learning barriers to entry. How things have changed!
Moving image is suddenly a medium for us all. Pocket-sized HD camera or next to nothing, editing packages that come free with practically any computer, have all helped to open our worlds to the boundless possibilities of filmmaking. Rather than skill, talent and money, the ingredients for great shorts productions have increasingly become skill, talent and time. If you’re inspired to flex your creative muscles into making a shortfilm, there’s never been a better time than now. Let’s get shooting!
Where to Begin
Quickflick wants to leave your imagination and creativity as unconstrained as possible. We only ask that you keep your creation to under 180 seconds long, and allow yourself to be inspired by a THEME that Quickflick directors around the world collectively vote for and decide on every two months, we’re a democracy after all!
We announce each new theme at the end of our Screening Parties, in our Call for Entry emails, through our Social Networking Groups and right here on Quickflick.tv. Your local city page tells you the local deadline date and where and how to submit your Quickflick.
The THEME is simply the first step - the starting point from which your creativity can leap and fly - then its totally up to you! We love for Quickflickers to explore all genres, styles and formats - the most important ingredients are originality, learning by doing and capturing an audience’s imagination by telling a great short story!
Contact a Curator
We’re not some faceless online blackhole to throw your precious creative masterpiece down and hope for the best! Quickflick is run in each of our cities by a Team of shortfilm aficionados - real people who have as much passion for the work of our global filmmaking community as the filmmakers themselves!
Our Quickflick Curators in each city are themselves filmmakers and often make Quickflicks too. They know what its all about and how challenging… but ultimately rewarding it is to produce something you’re really proud of and have your creation screened in front of a live audience! Quickflick Curators assemble the Screening Party shows - they look after your film and make sure its shown in the best possible light - they want to help you develop your craft and make more Quickflicks… they’re there for you!
Contact your local Curators through our City and Team Pages on this site.
The Masterclass
Most Quickflick cities organise Masterclasses a few days before the Screening Parties. These are intimate gatherings specifically for the filmmakers who’ve produced and are submitting a Quickflick for the latest theme.
Our Producer and Curator Teams try to invite an experienced and respected filmmaker to join the gathering as well - to help provide valuable feedback and encouragement to a group dedicated to learning by doing. Masterclasses encourage open and candid discussions and appraisals of each others’ work. All the submissions are screened in this group, either with a small projector or even a Laptop.
The spirit of the meetings harks back to Quickflick’s origins in New York in 2001, when the original group would gather in our shoebox apartments, share our latest creations with the rest of the group and feel a genuine sense of communal spirit and encouragement for our creativity and filmmaking efforts.
Your Premiere
Then the scene is set, you’ve Produced a Quickflick that you’re really proud of. You’ve worked with a team you’ve gathered together for the production, or perhaps it was just you and AfterEffects. You’ve completed it for the deadline, benefited from encouragement of the Masterclass or at the very least from your local Quickflick Team of organisers. Now is the moment your film is screened in front of a live audience! Ah! The tension! What will they think? Will they enjoy it? Will it entertain them?!?
There’s only one way to find out!
Quickflick World is all about filmmakers old and new throwing themselves into their craft, creating something for themselves, their friends and their showreels, something they can be really proud of…. then finally, its about GAUGING a live audience’s reaction and hopefully affirmation for their creative brilliance!
The Golden Quickie
Most Quickflick parties also include an element of competition, where the audience or a panel of judges chooses their favorite new local submission and award that filmmaker the Golden Quickie
- which includes a whole range of different prizes depending on the city.
Free equipment hire for your next film, filmmaking courses to continue to develop and fine-tune your craft, film ‘clinics’ with experienced directors and production houses…. even cameras-to-keep are awarded in some cities! Ask your local Quickflick Team for details.
The spirit, of course, is not about just WINNING, but in creating a Quickflick and screening it in front of a live audience in the first place! The Golden Quickie is just the icing on the cake for the filmmakers who go the extra distance and manage to produce something outstanding!
Going Global
Once your film has been screened in one of our Screening Parties, is that it? Oh NO!
The next step is where the magic of being part of a truly Global Community of Quickflickers really pays off. For each new theme and round of submissions, an international Jury consisting of Quickflick organisers from all of our cities, watches ALL the new Quickflick submissions from around the world - and chooses a selection that inspire us the most. This global Showcase opens the next Screening Parties in all the Quickflick cities around the world!
This means your film not only is seen by a much larger audience everywhere, but also that your creation becomes part of a unique collective global consciousness and voice - helping audiences around the world see our multi-cultural, racial and divided planet as really being made up of just people, everywhere, with the same dreams and visions as you have. Your Quickflick becomes another small reason to stop fearing other cultures and celebrate instead the amazing breadth of our diversity and creativity.
Beautiful, huh? We like to think so.
Filmmaker's Agreement
Being inspired by Quickflick to create a short film and then submitting that to be shown at a Screening Party by no means transfers exclusive rights of films to Quickflick World festival.
Filmmakers are free to distribute and promote their films as they desire. Quickflick also retains the right to exhibit, distribute and promote submissions as it sees fit, with the understanding that any royalties or revenues that come from agreements involving the content will be shared evenly between with the filmmaker and Quickflick World.