On July 13 2021, Indie Shorts Mag turned 6 and hosted its first edition of the Short Film Festival. Hosting our own short film festival was a long due dream for everyone at Indie Shorts Mag. We wanted to host it the previous year when we turned 5, but thanks to Covid-19, that went kaput. We were in the middle of the pandemic, and things weren’t looking promising. We considered an online short film festival, but with limited resources and time, that was better left undone. Also, we lacked strong tech support for an online festival back then. Although, the story is different now! Kudos to our tech team! They researched and partnered with amazing platforms to host our first festival. We will soon share how we handled live video and 800+ concurrent viewers. Today, however, we are here to see how Filmstro helped us create unique music for our festival announcement video.
What is Filmstro?
Filmstro is a royalty-free music library with unlimited downloads and customisations. It’s a platform that additionally lets you create unique scores to suit your video using their world-class editing software.
Why we chose Filmstro for our videos?
We were using AudioJungle for our royalty-free music needs. They have an amazing library too, but our video editors always had to edit the video to fit within the music we downloaded from AudioJungle. We always wanted to do it the other way around, but hiring a composer was/is a costly affair, and being a small publisher, that was out of the question.
Enter Filmstro. When our video editor discovered Filmstro and showed us a demo, our minds were blown. Just by changing some settings, we could create unique music and that too instantly! Not only that, we didn’t have to spend anything additionally on it. It was a true moment of Eureka for us! So we switched to Filmstro without a second thought and voilà! The quality of our videos now are to vouch for.
How did Filmstro become the exclusive sponsor of Indie Shorts Mag Short Film Festival 2021?
We had no concrete plans on how to go about bringing a sponsor on board. In fact, we decided to approach a sponsor only two months before the event. I still remember the meeting where we toyed about approaching sponsors for the event. And, the first and the only name that my team came up with was Filmstro. We wanted a sponsor with who the audience, too, would be able to connect. We decided to approach Filmstro, knowing fully well that we had no Plan B or any other sponsor to fall back on!
We dropped an email to Filmstro, and soon received a response from Sebastian Jaeger, the founder of Filmstro. He was more than happy to accommodate and consider us! Since both, Indie Shorts Mag & Filmstro have similar interests, the outcome of the meeting didn’t come out as a surprise. We are both here for filmmakers, and our partnership is simply a means to validate our mottos. Sebastian was keen to sponsor the event by awarding his amazing software to winning filmmakers. He is one of the few cool founders I’ve met, and I loved his energy.
How has Filmstro helped us boost the quality of our videos and also avoid any copyright headaches?
Like I mentioned before, with Filmstro, we are now making music to suit our video requirements and not the other way around! This has, quite naturally, boosted our video qualities and that too, almost instantly. We now make changes, as freely as possible to the video(s) and later make adjustments to the music in Filmstro.
Now let’s talk about copyright issues. If you are someone who uses royalty-free music, chances are you might have received a copyright strike on YouTube, Facebook or Instagram. Consider yourself lucky if you haven’t. When we used music from AudioJungle, we received a copyright notice for every video, and it was always cleared, but only after we appealed. We even had a situation where one of our YouTube live streams were taken down because of a claim. It was very frustrating, and we couldn’t do much. We are not blaming royalty-free music sites for this; we understand that they have to do this to help the composer who created these beautiful tracks, but as the end-user, let’s say the experience was less than pleasant.
Once we started using Filmstro, we remained headache-free. We didn’t receive a single copyright notice from any of the platforms. This boosted our confidence and faith in Filmstro and we slowly started using it everywhere. No copyright claims or embarrassing takedowns while your event is live either!
Let’s look at how we used Filmstro to create music for the final announcement video for Indie Shorts Mag Short Film Festival (ISMSFF) 2021. Our winner announcement video was 21 minutes long. If we used the same music on a loop, that would have been pretty unoriginal and boring. Not to mention the tepid energy it would have given off! We wanted the event to have its tempo in sync with the celebratory mood. Additionally, we also wanted more thumping to the music when the winner of each category was announced. If you look at the video below, you will notice how we tweaked the music to be different when the winner is announced. Also, we kept changing the momentum, depth and the power of the music after each category. So after each category, the music felt different, and the transition was smooth. Please keep in mind that the below demo video was recorded later for this article and doesn’t represent the final audio we used.
Pretty cool, right?
Use the widget below and try this yourself. Click on the play button below to begin.
We thank the Filmstro team for this amazing piece of software and for sponsoring the first edition of our short film festival.
Winners of ISMSFF 2021 will get access to Filmstro for life. Now you can too; Filmstro is offering a lifetime deal for a limited time. Filmstro normally costs $499 per year, but if you act now, you can grab it for a one-time fee of $189 and use Filmstro forever. Yes, you read that right. Click here to grab this limited-time deal before it’s gone.
Once you get your hands on Filmstro, create some amazing videos and send them to us. We will feature your video and you in our upcoming article that features Filmstro users and videos they created.
