See the whole festival run
before you spend a single fee.

Storyflow lays your festival run out as a campaign map: the festivals sit in tiers and the deadlines are sequenced against your finish date. You track every submission, waiver and outcome on the board, and the press kit, stills and trailer references stay beside the plan. You still submit to festivals and pay the fees in one place on FilmFreeway, which Storyflow does not handle.

Start from what each tier does for the film. The top tier is the small set of premiere-eligible majors that could change the film's life; they get the premiere window and the earliest submissions. The second tier is strong regionals and well-programmed mid-size festivals that build the laurel bar and the screening history. The third tier is genre and niche festivals where the film is a natural fit and the odds are honest. The last tier is local and community screenings, which are worth doing but only after the premiere question is settled. The test for every candidate is the same: look at what it programmed last year and ask whether your film would have belonged in that lineup. Tiering is a fit judgment, not a prestige ranking.

Yes, and it is worth being plain about this. FilmFreeway is where submissions actually happen: it holds your project page, processes entry fees, and is the platform nearly every festival uses to receive films. Storyflow does not submit to festivals and does not try to. What Storyflow holds is the strategy layer that FilmFreeway does not: the tier map, the premiere logic, the sequencing of waves against your finish date, and the press assets beside the plan. In practice the two work together. You decide on the Storyflow map which festivals get which wave, you execute the submissions on FilmFreeway, and you log the outcomes back on the board where the next decision gets made.

Not during early access. Storyflow is paid-only right now, with plans starting at $9.99 a month, and a Free plan launches before the end of 2026. Anyone a paid member invites to a board joins free today, so your producer or co-director can work on the campaign without paying. If you want a free option this minute, a Google Sheets tracker is genuinely serviceable for logging submissions and deadlines, and FilmFreeway itself is free to browse and holds your project page. What the free stack will not give you is the visual campaign map, which is the part that catches sequence mistakes before they cost you a premiere.

Many major festivals require that your film has never screened publicly before, either anywhere in the world or anywhere in their country or region. A world premiere can be spent exactly once, and any public screening spends it, including a small local festival or a cast-and-crew event that sold tickets. This is why the shape of the run matters more than the list of deadlines: an acceptance at a minor festival in March can silently disqualify the film from the major you were saving it for in September. The defensive move is to mark premiere requirements on every top-tier candidate and hold all lower-tier submissions until the premiere window has either paid off or been deliberately released.

In late post, before the film is finished and before the first fee is paid. The reason is that festival deadlines run on a fixed calendar and your finish date does not. Laying the two against each other tells you which submission waves are realistic with a final mix and grade, and which early deadlines you would be paying with an unfinished cut, which is usually money wasted. Planning early also protects the premiere: the order of your first three or four submissions largely determines the ceiling of the run. Filmmakers who start planning after the film is done tend to submit to whatever closes next, which is exactly the deadline-list thinking that burns eligibility.

Give every submission its own card with the festival, the date sent, the fee paid or the waiver code used, and the current status: submitted, in consideration, accepted, passed, or withdrawn. Keep the cards on the same board as the tier map, because an outcome is not just a result, it is the trigger for the next decision. When the top-tier passes come back, the second wave goes out; when an acceptance lands, everything that conflicts with its premiere terms gets pulled. A tracker separated from the strategy can tell you what happened, but only a tracker on the map can tell you what to do about it. Log fees honestly too; runs die of a hundred forty-dollar decisions, and the total should be visible.

The standard kit is a short synopsis and a long synopsis, a director's statement, bios and headshots for the key creatives, three to five high-resolution stills, the poster or key art, the trailer link with a downloadable version, full credits, technical specs, and contact information. Festivals and journalists ask for the same pieces over and over, so the work pays off once and gets reused all season. The practical failure is not writing the kit, it is scattering it: the stills in one drive, the statement in a doc, the trailer link in an email thread. Keeping the kit on the same canvas as the campaign map means that when a programmer asks, the answer takes minutes, and the stills you send are the selects you actually chose.

Yes, and it changes the quality of the conversation. Share a view-only link and your producer, sales agent, or publicist opens the entire campaign in a browser with no account: the tier map, the premiere status, every pending submission, and the asset kit. That is a far better basis for a strategy call than a status email, because both sides are reasoning from the same picture. If someone should actually work on the plan, invite them to the canvas and they can add festivals, log outcomes, and leave comments on specific cards. You can also export the board as an image or PDF when an executive producer or financier wants a snapshot for a meeting.

Most indie runs land somewhere between fifteen and forty submissions, and with typical entry fees running from about 25 to 100 dollars each, a serious campaign is easily one to three thousand dollars before travel. That number is exactly why strategy beats volume. A tiered plan spends the budget deliberately: a handful of premiere-eligible majors, a solid band of regionals and genre festivals where the film honestly fits, and waivers hunted wherever possible, since many festivals grant them if you ask or meet criteria. The alternative, submitting to whatever closes next until the money runs out, is the most common way good films have quiet festival runs. Set the fee budget on the board first and make every submission argue for its slot.