Festival Judging Results & Film Freeway
Updated 4/16/25
The Michigan Student Film Festival and DAFT is proud to partner with Film Freeway as a vessel for our judging. It allows entries to be viewed via YouTube, Vimeo, Google folder links as well as direct uploads. It also provides students an opportunity to enter multiple festivals nationally and internationally through a single platform.
Here's some important information about our differences.
DAFT judges DO NOT use Film Freeway's internal judging system.
Our 70+ judges instead use a customized Google Form that provides many more areas of assessing student work, both holistically in technical areas as well as more open-ended ways through detailed paragraphs.
Within 10 days of the festival itself, the students are sent via their teachers detailed PDFs of feedback from each judge. In addition to the certificates, program and prizes this process creates a wealth of data that goes right back to the filmmakers and what truly makes this festival so unique.
DAFT Awards vs. Film Freeway Award Notifications
There are four possible awards a film may receive.
- Best of Show
- Screened at the Festival, chosen from the Excellence level films and given a special trophy in addition to the certificates all entrees receive.
- Excellence
- Cited for outstanding level of quality in content and/or technical achievement.
- Honor
- Cited for a higher than average level of quality in content and/or technical achievement.
- Merit
- Commendation for undertaking and completing a media production.
Before Film Freeway sends out its results in an auto-email, DAFT sends each instructor an email detailing each submitted film's title, students and award--see sample below.
Sample email list of awards sent to a teacher with their students' entries' final results.
Film Freeway will send results in an auto-email to submitters. Its scores relate to our judging levels per below
In Film Freeway this film received a 9 which translates to Excellence.
- Our Festival judging coordinator Alana entered all the data on April 16th for the 2025 Festival.
- Alana also selected the Merit, Honor, Excellence to reflect the festival judging teams final decisions.
Sample pull-down for our judging coordinator to reflect DAFT final award level.
If you have any further questions about Film Freeway and its correlation to final awards for the Michigan Student Film Festival please contact us at info@daftonline.org.
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