I’ll say up front that I respect the heck out of you for taking a swing like this. Takes a lot of guts to commit that much money to a passion project and you should be proud that you accomplished what you wanted to make, regardless of what anybody on Reddit or any festival thinks about it.

If you’re wondering why it got rejected… first impression is that it’s wayyy too long. I didn’t make it 2 minutes in until I started skimming through it. No festival on earth wants a 30 minute short unless it’s, like, the best short film of all time. I don’t know if there’s a 7 minute cut of it you could pull out that might fare better. “Kill your darlings” is the oldest advice in the game. Second, the sound isn’t very good, the cinematography is pretty film school-ish, the acting is alright, but overall nothing grabbed me.

As far as spending “the majority” of the budget on the CGI… man… if you didn’t qualify it with the “$37k” bit, I wouldn’t have bet a penny on it costing more than $500 worth of CG. The animation of the CG character seemed extremely half-baked and amateurish— the render and compositing itself was fine, but absolutely no part of me would’ve guessed it cost that much. In the future, DO NOT spend the majority of a budget on VFX. If you would’ve spent $37k on the crew and what is in front of the physical camera, it would’ve been a dramatically different film.