ITZON.TV

Ongoing competition

Call for Entries
Online monthly film festival submissions open (rolling deadline).
Submit at http://filmmaker.submission.itzon.tv/ or Withoutabox

Contact Info

Festival's Websites:
http://www.itzon.tv/
www.facebook.com/itzon.tv
http://www.twitter.com/itzontv
http://www.itzon.fest21.com/

Festival's office:
Smiths Farm, Cullompton, Devon, EX15 3TJ, UK

Festival's Contacts:
Festival Director - Hannah Vincent
+44 (0) 208 1233267 
hannah@itzon.tv
Festival Admin - Katie L'Herpiniere
+44 (0) 208 1233218  
team@itzon.tv

The video blog with dailies on fest21.com

Mission

itzon is a powerful marketing platform for the independent filmmaker. Our mission was to create an interactive online film festival and digital broadcast platform, designed to discover and showcase exceptional film content and to provide an innovative and fully interactive marketing service for filmmakers.

Our vision is to play our part in helping more independent productions get distribution deals or be acquired for mainstream TV broadcast and to help filmmakers create co-pro opportunities, win commissions, achieve film sales, get recognition and build a global fan base for their work.

Objectives

Our objectives are to promote the fact that a film's fan base can be as great, if not greater, than a huge advertising campaign, to mobilise the viral voice and help audiences and filmmakers ask traditional and longer established broadcast outlets - ‘why can't you commission more productions like this?' and to develop into a premium resource for traditional broadcasters and distributors to source new films and talent.

Festival Award Categories
The film festival award categories are;
Best Fiction,
Best Animation
Best Documentary

Itzon showcases anything from a 90 second microshort right through to 2 hour epic feature; one off's, series' or multiparts, scientific documentaries, historical biographies, extreme sports, right through to drama, comedy and sci-fi. itzon is a celebration of the independent spirit of engaging and original storytelling through diverse voices and films that push the boundaries. The film festival awards are given monthly, and 2 month in arrears. For example all films transmitted in the live stream during December will be part of the December festival. However they will continue to receive votes for a further 30 days in the VoD system (during January). The audience votes are then tallied at the start of February. The 5 films with the most audience votes in all three categories will be assessed by a judging panel to find a winner in each. As well as cash and additional prizes the winners will be interviewed for a feature in the digital magazine as well as being relisted for a further 30 days in the VoD system allowing them the potential to earn even more revenue from further audience views.

Content Selection
While any filmmaker can upload to the site, not everyone will make the cut. itzon is a curated selection of the best films, documentaries and animations from around the globe and our pre-screening, selection and custom encoding systems aim to preserve the highest possible quality.

Submit your film
Submit at http://filmmaker.submission.itzon.tv/ or Withoutabox
For guidelines on formats we except please download our filmmakers info PDF at http://itzon.tv/facebook/pdf/filmmaker_info.pdf

Earn revenue with your film
In addition to our festival, by submitting your film to itzon you can earn revenue at the same time as gaining exposure.  All films after their online festival screening date will be put onto the VoD system for 30 days. The main festival stream is free to watch in order to build interest for each of the films shown, and then the VoD service has two viewer options. Either a free version that contains adverts, the revenue from these adverts is split with the filmmaker, or an advert free version that requires the viewer to have purchased credit, again revenue is split with filmmaker. Revenue is allocated fairly by the number of views each film has received. The VoD is limited for just 30 days for because itzon is both a monthly film festival and a marketing service. 30 days allows enough time for filmmakers to gain adequate feedback to be able to pitch to broadcasters potentially earn revenue from their VoD views but not damage their chances of a worldwide distribution deal by having the film online available to view for a lengthy period.

Additional Features
Itzon's interactive facilities offer the ability for the audience and fans to have a say in which films receive the monthly festival awards, a way for the audience to support you the filmmaker by purchasing DVD's, soundtracks or any other merchandise associated with the film, as well as the opportunity to send you a message.

The Visual Experience

 When itzon goes live, the first thing that you will notice is that it looks like TV and not like an internet video hosting website. There is a continual live stream of content being played. This is an enjoyable and familiar viewing format that showcases the festival films at their best. To prevent video stalling (buffering) which ruins the viewing experience, itzon uses bandwidth detection to autoselect the most appropriate quality for the users bandwidth connection. All films are encoded onto the system in 3 qualities up to HD720p

Each film that is selected into the festival will be shown 3 times in a single day's schedule of programmes (once for each of the world's major time zones). It is this ‘live' transmission, which is the main marketing function in itzon. All films will have their transmission time listed in the digital weekly Whatzon magazine. The magazine, which also contains featured articles, trailers, interviews etc and is colour coded to allow audience members the ability to browse by genre, will be delivered to the audiences by email as well as being available to view on the channel. Viewers have spent years looking through TV listing magazines and EPGs in order to plan their viewing week. Similarly at festivals, audiences view programmes in order to decide what they would like to watch. Extensive video hosting websites, as fantastic as they are, don't allow for this. Unless you know exactly what you are looking for, you would never find all the fantastic work hidden throughout the millions of hours of content.
Whilst visually looking like a TV channel, itzon's stream of content is a next generation film festival. One key function of a Film Festival aside from celebrating great filmmaking is to showcase films to buyers and distributors. itzon intends to be no different, it is just using the advancements of technology to allow people to do this without having to attend a festival if they are unable to.
Watch the Demo
Let us show you the features in action at http://filmmaker.itzon.tv/

Partnerships
As well as having a large number of exceptional independent films already submitted, we have also partnered up with several distributors, who have seen that itzon can provide an innovative marketing service to the films they represent at no extra cost. In addition to this is the added benefit for distributors who have an online pay-to-view online catalogue. Once the 30 day VoD period for a film they represent has elapsed, should a viewer search our VoD system for that particular film, a listing will appear in our partners list which offers a direct link back to the distributors online pay-to-view page and effectively acts as a free advert for them as long as our system is live.
itzon supports both established and emerging filmmakers and in doing so we offer platform for the very best in film talent to reach a broader audience and to earn money from their productions. We are happy to create specific and curated showcase opportunities for groups of work from Festivals and Film Schools; if you represent a Film Festival or Film School do contact the itzon team to find out how we can help to promote the work of your collaborators, contributors and students.