Thank you for submitting an entry for the 2019 Bike Shorts film festival, premiereng September 27th at Roanoke's Grandin Theare. Before submitting your film, please be sure to read all the rules and technical information included on this form. E-mail questions to bikeshortsroanoke@gmail.com or use the Contact Us form on this site.

The Bike Shorts Film Festival offers awards in several categories: our Juried, Best Local Film, Best Teen Film, and Best Original Music prizes are all selected by a panel of judges drawn each year from the local arts, cultural, and civic community. We offer five Audience Choice awards, one for each of our four regional screenings in Roanoke, Blacksburg, Clifton Forge, and Lynchburg. Finally, we offer a YouTube award for the film that has the highest view count – per YouTube’s verified views measure – by the end of October 2019.

To be eligible for screening and award consideration, all submissions must meet the eligibility guidelines below.

Submitting Your Film

Submitting your film electronically is preferred. We accept films via Dropbox or any cloud service, and can provide FTP access to upload a film to ridesolutions.org. You may make arrangements for digital delivery of your film by contacting us at bikeshortsroanoke@gmail.com.

You may also submit your film by mail on CD, DVD or flash drive. Mailed submissions will not be returned and must include a completed entry form. Address all submissions to: Bike Shorts Film Festival, c/o RIDE Solutions, P.O. Box 2569, Roanoke, VA 24010

Eligibility:

To be eligible to have your film considered for screening or awards at the Bike Shorts Film Festival it must:

• Feature a bicycle or bicycling as a substantive feature of its plot, lyrics (in the case of original music video) or photography.
• Be received (not postmarked) by midnight, September 27th, 2019.
• Films of any length will be considered, though submissions with a running time of 15 minutes or less have the best chance of being accepted.
• Films of any style will be considered, though we prefer narrative films or films with a complete, identifiable story arc.

For examples of past submissions, please visit our YouTube channel.

Directors may submit more than one film, though each film must be submitted as a separate, unique file and include its own registration form

Late Submissions

Filmmakers who contact the organizers within 24 hours of the deadline may request a deadline extension of up to, but no more than, 48 hours. Entries received after the 48 hour extension will not be considered for screening, and requests for extensions after the deadline has passed will not be considered.

Award Eligibility

Certain of our prizes have special eligibility as follows:

• Best Local Film: To be eligible for the Best Local Film category, the filmmaker must reside in the RIDE Solutions service area which includes the counties of Giles, Floyd, Montgomery, Pulaski, Roanoke, Alleghany, Botetourt, Franklin, Bedford, Appomattox, Campbell, Craig, and Amherst, and all cities and towns within those county boundaries.
• Best Original Music: This prize will be awarded to the film that makes the best use of an original musical composition. This may take the form of an original score for a traditional narrative or documentary film, or an original piece of music as used in a music video.  Music from public-domain or similar sources are not eligible for Best Original Music awards.
• Best Teen Film: To be eligible for the Best Teen Film category, the filmmaker(s) must all be between the ages of 13 and 18, as certified by the completion of this form.  Filmmakers submitting in this category will also be required to receive parental permission to participate in the Festival.

Indicate in the registration form below if your film will qualify for either of these two special awards in addition to the Juried Prize and Audience Choice awards.

File Specifications

Be advised that films submitted at or near deadline which encounter technical problems may not be selected to be screened. Participants are encouraged to submit films early enough to work out technical issues that may arise with RIDE Solutions staff.

• The following file format containers are acceptable: .AVI .MOV, .WMV (Windows Media); .MP4
• An aspect ratio of 16:9 is preferred, but 4:3 is acceptable. Please do not letterbox or pillar box your submission.
• Please e-mail technical questions to bikeshortsroanoke@gmail.com

E-mail questions before you submit and RIDE Solutions will do its best to help submissions meet these criteria.

Screening

We regret that we can’t promise all submitted films will be screened. Based on the total number of films submitted and total runtime some entries may not make the final festival. Films that are not screened will still be hosted on the Bike Shorts YouTube channel and will be eligible for the YouTube award.