Filmmakers in Ireland received some great news. A local initiative there will provide $1 Million Euros (over $1.4 million U.S. dollars) specifically targeted to short films.

€1m fund for Irish filmmakers launched

Budding filmmakers can now tap into a €1m fund launched today to boost the industry in Ireland.

The Irish Film Board (IFB) confirmed it has committed the cash to launching new projects aimed at promoting short films.

Read more details at Ireland Online

There is more information available from the Irish Film Board:

http://www.irishfilmboard.ie/programmes.php

Now, when will the U.S. government follow suit?

Looking for innovative ideas to fund your next project? Check out two interesting film funding ideas:

Buy a character

and

Movie ticket pre-sales

For more ideas, also take a look at Carole Dean’s new book The Art of Film Funding:

First in a series of posts that will discuss the extensive process of putting together a grant application.

Part I:
Essentially, the only way to fund a short film from an American independent filmmaker�s perspective is either through grant money or your money.

The key to funding a short film is planning. Poor planning can break the project before it has even begun, while decisive and smart planning can jumpstart it. Therefore when applying for a grant, the application has two key parts: the script and the budget.

Ensure that the script is compelling and that the budget is error-proof and airtight. If anything is questionable at all in the budget, make sure to disclose an appropriate note.

In addition to the script and budget, other items to support your grant application include synopsis, style breakdown, biography and casting information. These topics will be covered in a subsequent post on the Film Funding Blog.

Contributed by Christina Chen,
UC Berkeley student

Photo by Mahalie

The Boston Motion Picture Awards (BMPA) is a competition that started three years ago with the goal of helping independent filmmakers jumpstart their film careers. The awards are tied to several means of film funding. Winners of the competition not only receive money and resources, they also benefit from a variety of other perks, ranging from free screenwriting software to free subscriptions to industry magazines.

With categories such as “International Short-Film Competition” and “International Spoof-Writing Competition”, winners can receive up to thousands of dollars in cash and/or a distribution agreement. The application date starts on July 2nd and goes until September 15th.

The competition also includes judges whose industry backgrounds range from actors in Office Space, Gilmore Girls and directors and producers from The Albino Code, and a film critic from “The Boston Globe”.

The idea behind the BMPAs is the acknowledgement of the fundamental issue behind amateur filmmaking: money. While musicians can create hundreds of songs in their garage or authors can write a variety of short stories, filmmaking is an artistic medium that simply cannot exist without a significant amount of funding. Thus after winning a BMPA prize, filmmakers have a foot up in their future film ventures.

Get more general information about this competition from its main website:
http://www.bostonawards.com/

Contributed by Christina Chen,
UC Berkeley student