Welcome to IndieRoar Online Film Festival and Competition YEAR ONE! 

IndieRoar had some pretty humble beginnings.

As filmmakers ourselves, one of the first things we learned was:  There is "not much to do with a short film once it's finished." You learn that because every short film maker goes through, pretty much, the same path of inspiration: they watch a movie and say: I can do that. Or they're starting a career and make a resume builder.  Once all that time effort and money is spent, well, what do you do with it?

You try festivals.  Festivals, festivals, festivals.  You quickly discover that festivals are expensive to get into and expensive to travel to and have excruciatingly limited space to show films.  How many festivals have we applied to for our beloved short films?  How many hundreds of dollars have we spent trying to get screened?  Only to have ones film, accepted a couple of places, if that.

A case in point: A short film that some of us at IndieRoar made a few years ago, got into a festival. Which was great.But, the festival didn’t bother to let us know that it was in!  We only found out because we happened to google it one day. Thanks, festival. Glad you thought about us.

There're a million other weird and similar stories out there. We knew short films don't get much love.   When we thought about it, we realized there didn’t seem to be any good, user-friendly web based festivals, either.  The web is the best place for short films.  We put that in the back of my mind and didn’t think about it again until…

Several months later, Ian Reinhard was chatting with a friend about a new company called Shroggle.  Shroggle creates websites and networks.  Ian thought:  hmmmm……? I He said:  I want to create an online short film festival.  Could every entry have it’s own customized/customizable web-page?  Shroggle said:  Yes.  Ian said:  Could every film entry be grouped according to category?  Shroggle said:  Yes.  Ian asked:  Do you feel like sponsoring it?  Shroggle stared blankly at Ian.  Ian said:  C’mon, it’ll be fun. 

How many adventures start with conversations like that? 

We worked on the design and layout of the festival for a few months and than set to building it.  Originally, the festival was going to have 3 three categories: Drama, Comedy and Horror.  Another friend pointed out that that limits the festival too much.  He suggested we add Documentary and Animation.  It was a good idea, so we did. 

Next, we we started approaching a variety of different entertainment professionals to act as judges for the competition part of the festival (see  http://indieroar.com/JUDGES).  To our great excitement, people were saying, "Yeah, sure. I love short films." The judges we have are: actors, directors, editors, a lawyer,  animators and a few other odd jobs.  They all have varied, but substantial independent backgrounds. When we started thinking a little more about this we thought, the people who are really going to know what’s good in each category, are the people who watch a lot of the entries. So we decided to put a viewer  at the judge’s table as the third judge per category.

We have discovered that the more you work on something, the more inspiration continues to flow into it. We knew filmmaking is really about community and networking. So it seemed obvious to put a big emphasis on ways to network, ways to share information, ways to provide exposure and discussion. Festivals are good at that and filmmaking needs it like oxygen. So dreaming up the whole Community section of the site was a no brainer. 

It is the hope of the team at IndieRoar that IndieRoar will serve the short filmmaking community: to see each other’s films, meet each other over the Internet and learn from each other the art of filmmaking.  It is the hope of IndieRoar that everyone that gets involved has a good experience and gets useful feedback on their project.   Each entry gets its own webpage that can be customized for the best effect of your film.  We hope that you will take advantage of that opportunity to showcase your work.

This is the first year of IndieRoar, Online Short Film Festival and Competition.  We want to hear how we live up to expectations!  Drop a line at http://indieroar.com/ROARUM_THE_FORUM or at the http://indieroar.com/INDIE_BOOGIE_MAN_BLOG.  We look forward to hearing from you. We are already pretty excited about the future of this festival, making it a destination on the web, and a spot on everyone's calendar.

Good luck everybody.