Saturday Is Deadline For San Diego Film Awards Submissions

The Film Consortium San Diego was founded in 2012 to increase the quality and quantity of film projects here. To further that goal, the organization established the San Diego Film Awards two years ago. KPBS arts reporter Becca Mondo speaks with the consortiums founder and president about the awards since the submission deadline is this weekend. The San Diego Film Awards are coming up. For people who may not know what these are, explain it. It is an award show that we produce annually that gives out awards and recognition to local actors and local film makers and talent. It is modeled after the Academy Awards but it is highly localized. All the films and filmmakers and actors that receive awards are local. Who is organizing this? Business all the work of the film consortium? We work as well with folly Luis from tonight in San Diego. He is our director. We also work with a group of people in town who help support us. It is a little bit of a collaboration among various groups of film makers that find it exciting or fun to produce the show. How long has this been going on? This will be our fourth annual San Diego awards. It is an exciting time. If you want to enter these awards, what does a filmmaker need to do? What are the requirements to qualify? The expectation of any film that enters the San Diego Film Awards is that it was released during the previous year. It has to be released during 2016. We can't bring out a film you may 10 years ago. Once that is met, the expectation is that it is produced here in San Diego and 80% of the resources from San Diego. The goal in setting up these awards, what did you have in mind? Is this because he wanted to keep people in San Diego working or raise the bar on the kind of films that are being made? All of the above. The original goal hasn't changed much. That is increase the quality and quantity of projects in San Diego. If you look at any industry, there are awards. Any legitimate industry has been awards style presentation. How they do it may vary but the expectation and the goal is the same. It is getting people recognition for quality work locally here in San Diego. It is not something that existed before. It has kind of served double purposes. I really like that it is something for people to want, to put effort into making a great film I wins an award. Also, I think it helps rise to the top some of the quality people that are out there. To the awards process, you get to see and meet and work with some of the best people in town for different skill sets. That has allowed us to really find great people to work with on other projects that are not just film awards related. Some of the years the awards have been going on, how have the entries changed in the sense that the numbers have grown or the quality of the entries in the number of categories that you give awards for? The amount of entries initially was really high but we also were retroactive. We took films from years before. Now, we only take it from a specific timeframe which is one year. Also, a lot of the films have gotten longer. Initially, it was a lot of 48 hour films in very short fun films. Now, we are getting multiple 20 and 30 and 40 minute films that are being contributed to -- to the film awards. The thing I would say that blows my mind is to think of where we are today. Some of the things that have dramatically increased our production value, the scope of what people try and pull off, the types of locations they get, the visual effects that they are able to include. Also, the acting. Acting has come phenomenally far. I would also say -- I mentioned the scope of what people are trying to pull off. Lengthed versus trying to do a short film. Now, people are trying to do some comprehensive things. In terms of the categories that people can enter, obviously you have feature and short but what are the things that people can submit films for? The majority of the films that have been submitted have been short films. The majority of the awards that we give out which is essentially the same you would get from the Academy award categories, similar like that. Best Director, best cinematography, best makeup, etc. Those go to short films but we have a web series category, a TV show category here commercial, music video. Our feature category we are really working towards growing. Our goal is to not shipped completely away from short films but to shipped more towards recognition of the feature films. We might add a few more awards that weren't present before because we really want to encourage the production of feature films. We are starting to see people going more and more towards making the longer four productions. If somebody wants to enter, what do they need to do? The deadline for the film awards is December 31. What that will do is it puts the film into review for the San Diego Film Awards. Also, we have San Diego Film Week which will be the first time that it has ever been done. It is here February 10 through the 19th. That is where we will screen the nominees for the film awards. There will be a chance to watch these ahead of time and see what the films look like. It will be our big opportunity to check out what is out there before the film awards. Where do people go to submit a film? To submit a film, you have to visit our website. There is a link on the front page. That will send you to our site to submit your film. Once a film is submitted, what is the process for the judging? Is there a jury? Does everybody who goes get to vote? We put a lot of research into how people vote for film awards. Ours is a combination of a couple of different ways. First round we do a peer review. We bring together the filmmakers. I have up to 15 people who submitted films. They can't vote on their own films. They essentially create the list of nominees. They will go and watch the films. They will suggest which ones they think might deserve a best directing or a best screenplay award. Then, the highest scoring runs will become the nominees. Those are usually the ones that have to get 60 to 90% of the vote in order to be a nominee. From there, we take the nominees and we send it out to our judges. That is more the challenging part. We try and keep judges out of San Diego. The problem with getting judges out of San Diego is you have to know people out of San Diego who are willing to judge. We are working really hard right now to get more judges for the San Diego Film Awards that are not connected to any of the filmmakers. The goal is 80% of our judges will come from out of San Diego. We send it off to them and we have six of them to review each submission. What I learned from researching film awards is that there is no fair way to judge art except to not do it at all. That would be boring. We came up with a way that merged different established award systems. Thank you very much. The deadline once again is this Saturday. Visit www.kpbs.org for the link.