Submit!

San Diego Filmmakers would like to welcome our local talent to submit their short films for screening at the beginning of each monthly meeting.  We have allotted approximately 10 minutes for the screening, so only short films will be shown.  If you would like to share your work with our community please use the following instructions.

  1. Create a Vimeo account.  Most people will only require a free account.  A paid “Plus” account is only required for larger video uploads and is not a requirement of our screening process.
  2. Upload your video to Vimeo.  If you want to keep the video from being shown publicly due to film festival rules, set the “Privacy” settings to “Who can see this video?”  = “People you choose” and “Where can this video appear?” = “Nowhere (only appears on Vimeo.com)”.  For most people the default settings allowing public viewing will work.  In that case you don’t have to change any privacy settings. We also suggest adding your video to the San Diego Filmmakers Group. This is not a requirement of the submission process, however it is a convenient way to share your work with our filmmaker community and solicit peer feedback.
  3. Add Vimeo user San Diego Filmmakers as a contact and message us through Vimeo that you would like to have your film considered for screening.  Please do not email, Facebook message, or tweet your request; Use Vimeo messaging.  If you set your privacy settings to limit who can view your video, please add <our Vimeo user name> as a user that can view the video.
  4. We will screen your film and choose appropriate ones that correlate to the meeting topic.  For instance, if our guest speaker is talking about acting then we may show a few actor demo reels.  If the guest speaker is a musician, we may show music videos.  We do not limit our selections to fiction film.  Fiction films, documentaries, music videos, ad spots, animation, demo reels, television work, experimental films, plus any others forgotten here are welcome.  This is all about showing local talent and their achievements.
  5. If your video is publicly viewable we may want to add it to our SDF Channel.  Please let us know if this is OK when you message us.  Even if your film doesn’t fit our meeting topic we still may want to add it to the channel so that you at least get some additional exposure for your work.
  6. Be prepared to bring a digital file of your video to our monthly meeting.  The file must fall into the technical guidelines laid out here.
    1. Supported Resolutions – 1280x720 (HD), 640x360 (16x9 SD), or 640x480 (4x3, SD).
    2. Video Codec – H.264 (MOV,AVI,MP4), >10Mb/s bit rate for HD, >5Mb/s for SD
    3. Audio Codec – AAC (128kb/s or greater) or uncompressed (16-bit), mono or stereo
    4. Delivery Format – burned data (not video) DVD or USB thumb drive
  7. Since we are a volunteer organization we may only be able to let you know about screening your project a week ahead of the monthly meeting.  There is no Q&A for our screenings, so you are not required to be present but it’s obviously best if you can be at the meeting.