Ten easy mistakes to avoid in your Short Film Fund application

We’ve put together a list of ten ways to ensure that you aren’t making mistakes in your application to the Short Film Fund. We don’t expect every application to have perfect answers or budgets but avoiding these will help to ensure that you are putting your best foot forward when completing your Short Film Funding application.

1. 1. Read the guidelines - they are long but they contain lots of information to help you understand how to shape your application and what we are looking for. It's also really important to check you are eligible for the fund before starting your application as they won't reach us if you don't reach the eligibility requirements. 
   2. Use the budget and production schedule template (it can be found in the guidelines) - there is a 'Help and Information' page on the first tab that contains lots of information about rates and what can or can’t be included in your budget.
   3. Make sure that everyone is paid at least London Living Wage. All cast and crew must be paid this as a minimum - the only exception is for where you have internships or trainees who must be part of a training or education programme and have a letter of support from this institution.
   4. Ask us for what you need, not what you think we want to see. It’s important to be mindful of scale with your funding request, if you are still relatively new to filmmaking scaling your overall project is more effective than underestimating costs as we will be able to see that overall it will need a lot more to produce the work in a safe, ethical and creative way.
   5. On scale, a 19-page script very rarely translates to a 15-minute short. Be mindful of your page count and the length of your work and use the page per minute estimate if it helps guide you when writing your script.
   6. Don’t just give us a list of films for your CV, tell us a little about how they did and yourself as a filmmaker. It helps us to understand more about your portfolio and where this project fits into your career. When listing past work examples, make sure the most relevant is first as we can't guarantee readers will be able to watch all examples.
   7. Submit the project that you are passionate about, not the project you think we want to see. There is a misconception that BFI NETWORK predominantly support dramas however we are looking for ideas that take creative risks and support work across all genres. You can find out more about our previously supported work here.
   8. Help us to understand the tone and style of your work. While we don’t ask for visuals as supporting materials, if you have some please feel free to include them. If you don’t, help us to understand the stylistic choices by telling us comparable films and how they are influencing your work.
   9. Sustainability can be across both your production and editorial. This means that as well as telling us how you will limit your impact on the environment through good practice during all stages of production, also consider how the climate crisis can be reflected in your story. There are lots of tips for this on the BAFTA albert website.
   10. We don’t expect you to complete every box in the diversity standards section. If you have information for all of them please tell us however it is important that this remains achievable for the budget and time you have on a short.