It is with great sadness that we announce the end of the Boostyour15pages contest without being able to finish this adventure with you.

We have had a few setbacks in recent weeks, and now we need to restructure our project and concept, to better fit with our economic reality.

We can no longer, in the state of things, assure the winners to be able to produce their scripts as they deserve, and prefer to be straightforward with you and not wait to the last minute to inform you. We thank all of the writers who participated and the members of the jury who supported us.

We apologize for this major inconvenience. It is obviously possible for all participants to withdraw their screenplays and other documents from our website: just send an email to contact@boostyourfilm.com specifying the title of your script. The site, without the contest, will remain open to the public for an indefinite period. Boostyourfilm will not to use or reproduce the ideas presented in the contest.

The adventure stops there for the contest, but we hope that your desire to write and achieve beautiful things will retain its strength: movies always need to reinvent itself!

Here are some words from our president and founder Daniel Anton:

“Boostyourfilm is facing internal economic problems that have worsened in recent weeks and unfortunately, no longer can guarantee the outcome of the competition. We prefer to stop here before there are too many participants, too much work invested on your part as ours. We sincerely regret it because of course, we would have loved to finish this contest with you, to discover the finalists, to applaud the winners selected by the jury and to bring the six westerns to the screen.

I want to thank all the participants for your great stories, your enthusiasm, and your trust.

I also thank those who supported us, brought their ideas and participated in our debates.”

We have started a restructuring phase and we will inform you of the follow-up of Boostyourfilm.“

If you have any questions, you can reach us on our Facebook page or at contact@boostyourfilm.com

The Boostyourfilm Team

Cowboys chasing Indians, a betrayal, a gunfight or redemption. That smells like a Western. How do you like yours?

We at Boostyourfilm love the Western, that’s why it’s the theme of our Boostyour15pages competition. 

It’s the defining genre of America. The actor and director Clint Eastwood once said: “I always thought there were really only two American art forms: jazz and the Western.”

For me, the quintessential Western features John Wayne swaggering around the screen with his classic drawl, or a John Ford movie, such as The Searchers or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. But this genre is not limited to the big screen. I remember Sunday afternoons watching TV series such as Bonanza, Rawhide and Little House on the Prairie.

Plots were rarely complicated and involved cowboys fighting Indians, the construction of a railroad, outlaw gangs or revenge stories featuring a chase and-or somebody who has been wronged.

The genre has a grand scope and comes in many shapes and sizes. There is something for everyone. There’s the epic, which emphasizes the story of the American Old West on a grand scale. A great example of this is Once Upon a Time in the West, starring John Fonda and Charles Bronson.

Then there’s the classic Western, typified by films such as How the West was Won, a film following a family through several decades of Westward expansion in the nineteenth century – including the Gold Rush, the Civil War, and the building of the railroads. It won three Academy Awards.

If that’s not your bag there is the Curry Western – films made on the Indian subcontinent. Or even a sub-genre called the Meat Pie Western, sometimes called the Kangaroo Western. This is used to describe films made in an Australian setting.  If that’s not to your taste, there’s the Spaghetti Western.

But there’s no need to limit yourself to oldies. The genre lives. Remember Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, much detested by the Boostyourfilm president Daniel Anton? In contrast to this you have modern classics such as The Revenant, which won three Academy Award in 2015.

Simply the Best
For me, the best ever Western to come out in the cinema is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It was directed by the great Sergio Leone. It features a super script and has a kickass backing track. It is all set to the background of the American Civil War.  The cinematography is amazing. And it features cracking performances from Lee Van Cleef, Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach. What’s not to like? Here are my top five favourite Westerns.

The Good the Bad and the Ugly

A bounty hunting scam joins two men in an uneasy alliance against a third in a race to find a fortune in gold buried in a remote cemetery.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Two Western bank and train robbers flee to Bolivia when the law gets too close.

True Grit
A drunken, hard-nosed US Marshal and a Texas Ranger help a stubborn teenager track down her father’s murderer in Indian territory.

Blazing Saddles
In order to ruin a western town, a corrupt politician appoints a black Sheriff, who promptly becomes his most formidable adversary. OK, this may not be a classic in your eyes but it never fails to make me laugh.

Django Unchained
With the help of a German bounty hunter, a freed slave sets out to rescue his wife from a brutal Mississippi plantation owner.

So over to you, what’s your best ever Western?

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Unforgiven
Once Upon a Time in the West
Top three of
Daniel Anton, president of Boostyourfilm

For a Few Dollars More
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
The Hateful Eight
Top three of Boostyourfilm’s
Roméo

How do you get your amateur or short film out to an audience and be seen? That’s the question we posed to a buyer at the Clermont Ferrand short film festival

Building a community is crucial to a film’s success, a subject that we at Boostyourfilm has been extolling for a while. But we are not the only ones who are passionate about this subject.

According to William Page, the chief executive of Filmdoo: “Not only have you got to be a kickass filmmaker nowadays, you’ve got to be really good marketers.”

Page was speaking at a forum at the Clermont Ferrand Film Festival to promote his VOD platform, which focuses on helping people to discover and watch great films, short films and other content from around the world.

Unlike other VOD platforms, Filmdom is building a thriving global film community that it hopes will empower users to drive social recommendations and to help bring films to their region, many of which are festival award-winning movies that may not have received a traditional mainstream distribution.

Not only have you got to be a kickass filmmaker nowadays, you’ve got to be really good marketers

Page says as a filmmaker you now also have to consider yourself a marketer. And to do this, you have to build a community. It’s absolutely crucial, he says.

“When you are thinking of making a film or writing a script you have to ask yourself: who is my community, who is going to watch this movie, who is going to be passionate about this topic, who is this going to appeal to?

“If you are going to have a successful crowdfunding campaign you need to tap that community. So whether it’s Facebook, or Twitter or an awareness group or an issues-based group, it does not matter. As a small filmmaker, it’s all about community. The main objective of a crowdfunding campaign is not to raise money. It’s to raise the profile of the film.

“If you have 1,000 who put money into a film, Page asks, what are they going to do when the film comes out? They are going watch it and then they are going to tell their friends.”

Page referenced a film called Dreaming against the World about the life of Chinese artist Mu Xin.

The makers of this 37-minute documentary came to Filmdoo asking if the Vod platform would put its film online.

They asked for it be streamed for about four or five dollars. Page says he agreed but was skeptical that anyone was going to pay that amount of money to watch this movie. The film was put online and nearly crashed the platform, such was the demand.

Why? Because there was a community of people who were passionate about seeing this film because they loved the artist. So build your community.

Everton Gayle