Festival Strategy A.Cadieux

Festival Strategy

The primary purpose of the project is to gain experience developing an animation all the way through the pipeline. The project has plenty of script and pre-vis material to develop further content should the animation gain an audience. The benefit of having such a body of work online is to demonstrate substantial practice with the principles of animation and to show a sense of volition, and passion for storytelling and media development. Ultimately the work is a portfolio piece and has a greater sense of immediacy for communicating my abilities both as an artist and collaborator to prospective employers or clients. I plan on continuing to develop 3D and 2D animation skills and pursue jobs in writing, production and animation.
Originally when the project was planned to be an interactive comic I got in contact with Stu Cambell of nawlz.com. He was generous with is research and initial impressions. His research is based on the release of his interactive comic Nawlz. Although Cairns, is not interactive, Nawlz shares common themes such as cyberpunk and a dystopian future. They both have similar distribution and target audiences.
Cambell points out that for apps and other online media, one of the best boosts for exposure is being featured by the Apple store. He admits, however, that Apple is a bit of a black box as there seems to be no trend or obvious way of getting featured.

From his experience he suggests:
- a press release for each episode launch
- a through blast through the all of the obvious social media channels
- paid banners on a few demo appropriate web sites
- PR and plug requests on design hubs

For Cairns, a couple trailers and a PR kit will be developed. A combination of episode, tutorial and launch info will be used to do social media blasts. I will also take a lesson from Nawlz and attempt to enter the 3 festivals it seemed to perform best. Webby, SXSW and FWA.

Nawlz has won many awards since 2009 including :
2011 Mobile App of the Day (Oct 10) - http://www.thefwa.com/mobile/nawlz-interactive-ipad-comic
2010 Speaker at AG Ideas conference, Melbourne, www.agideas.net
2010 Webby Award Net Art Category for Nawlz.com
2010 SXSW Interactive Design Award - finalist for Nawlz.com
2010 Dope Award – Site of the Day
2010 Moluv - Site of the Day, www.nawlz.com
2010 Irie Awards – Site of the Day, www.nawlz.com
2009 FWA 'Site of the Day' for Nawlz.com
2009 Australian ATOM awards finalist Best Multimedia for Nawlz.com
2009 Design Licks 'Site of the Day' for Nawlz.com
2009 Australian Desktop Create Awards Silver Prize for Best Digital Media

List of Festivals

All festivals are intended to gain exposure across the web and respective festival
audiences.

SXSW sxsw.com

Operating since 1987
SXSWi dir. Hugh Forest
Category: Interactive Award Category, Motion Graphics for Flash
Required: the site title, URL, launch date, competition categories and your complete contact information.
Entry Fee: $30
Submissions due around October. Early entry late September.

Webby Awards webbyawards.com

Operating since 1995(formerly Webbie)
Executive dir. David-Michel Davies
Category: Online Film & Video:
Judging parameters: Concept & Writing, Quality of Craft, Integration, Overall Experience
Required: Category info, URL.
Entry Fee: $259
Submissions due November- December.
http://www.thefwa.com/submit_info
Category: Unknown
Ongoing
Judging parameters: Creativity, Originality, Design, Content, Personality

Favorite Website Awards thefwa.com

http://www.thefwa.com/submit_info
Category:Unknown
Ongoing
Judging parameters: Creativity, Originality, Content, Perosonality