Aidan Beatty is a student, and the writer and director of two short films.

Esther Terradas: How did you fund your first short?

Aidan Beatty: I applied for a Filmbase award, and at the same time applied for a local authority grant from Galway County Council Arts Office – which, in my runaway cockiness, I thought would be a useful supplement to the €10,000 Filmbase grant I just presumed I'd definitely get for my 'great' script. Obviously, as it turned out, I didn't get the Filmbase award, but did get €800 from Galway County Council. I supplemented this with about €500 of my own money and then, with a friend enlisted as producer, we squeezed as much as we could out of this €1,300. Unsurprisingly we went slightly over-budget, but managed to get a further €300 from Fingal Count Council Arts Office which paid off some outstanding bills from the production.

What do you think is most important when you apply to funding schemes (script, interview, awards previously received, application form...)?

As I understand it, the criteria for local authority grants differ somewhat from Filmbase and the film centres and such. While the quality and depth of imagination of what you want to do obviously matters, the primary concern seems to be whether this film will actually be of benefit to the community. My experience has been that the Arts Officers tend to believe that just having films made in the area is a good thing, and as such is a benefit to the community. This makes it much easier, it seems, to get funding than from the more well-known sources, though of course the size of the funding is much smaller.

Local Authority grants, how much can they help?

I think the best thing about these grant schemes is that they're an easily available source of funding for people who are still relatively unknown, especially if you do some 'creative application'. Say, if you were to have a producer who lives in Galway and a director who lives in Dublin, it is acceptable to apply for funding in both jurisdictions, and as such you could easily get €3,000 for your film. So for someone such as myself, who's just starting to make films, it's excellent. Obviously though, the idea is always to use a film made in this way as a springboard to getting a bigger budget.

Once the film is finished, how do you deal with promotion and distribution? What do you think of the existing options?

Well, so far I've only completed one film. I'm currently in the final stages of post-production with my second short, so this hasn't really been an issue for me yet. My first short, to be pretty honest, really showed up my own inexperience, and so I never made any concerted efforts to get it shown anywhere - I just felt it wasn't good enough to show. But the infrastructure for up-and-coming filmmakers to show their work - festivals, TV slots and such – seems quite good.

How many short films should you make before going to feature length?

I guess this depends on the filmmaker's own personal situation but for me, I'm nowhere near being close enough to that stage. I would say it'll take five or ten shorts for me to build up the experience, skill and confidence needed. Not to mention getting to a situation whereby people with the wherewithal to fund a feature would hand over to me the requisite amounts of cash to make a film.