In my case that film was made specifically for the Fox Movie Channel and they paid for it and produced it. It was a program (that no longer exists) that gave young filmmakers a chance to make short films in a professional environment and have them air on TV. I got the opportunity based on my previous short which I made in film school.

As for getting your independent short on TV I think the best way is to get the film out to as many festivals as you can because it's the easiest way to get it out there and get it seen. The biggest market for short films that I know of is the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival in France, where almost everyone in the world who buys short films gathers and basically shops for shorts of all kinds. You don't need to get accepted into the festival to sell your film. They have a market where buyers can watch any of the films that are submitted. It's competitive and you're unlikely to make tons of money from a short film but at this stage I think it's best to just get the exposure however you can.

I didn't originally plan to have Bad Animals transferred to film so for me it was just a means to an end. But generally speaking, most standard resolution video projection that I've seen has a slightly pixillated look and some of the lines look kind of jagged instead of smooth when blown up on a really big screen. With my film transfer I was pretty happy that the image held up pretty well going to film despite the limited resolution of the single chip video camera. The image was a little muddy as was to be expected but it didn't have those jagged video lines that you see on a TV when you look closely. But the video image doesn't improve in the transfer to film. It gets a little more of that film flicker when it's projected but the resolution is what it is.

I think sound is just as important as image so it's something to really think about and not take for granted. You can record decent sound even with very little money. If you're recording dialogue it's best to record it very cleanly without a lot of background noise so you probably need some kind of directional microphone or a lavelier mic (the little ones you pin to someone's shirt).

Whatever equipment you have my basic advice would be to just to take sound into consideration when you're planning the shoot just like you consider lighting or anything else. If you're going to record sound in sync with picture and try to edit the picture later into a seamless whole you can't shoot in a very noisy location because every time you cut you'll hear the sound change. Things like that.

Also there's a lot you can do with sound editing when you're finished shooting, especially now with the ease of digital editing. The way you layer and mix the various elements (dialogue, sound effects, backround ambience, music, etc.) will give the sound a lot more texture. All of this makes a huge difference to how the movie feels to the audience.

The main thing I got from film school was a chance to practice making short films and work with a lot of other people on their films. There doesn't seem to be any one right way of doing things so it's good to dabble for awhile and see what works for you, what your own sensibilities are and where to place your priorities. I think it's best to keep things as simple as possible and focus on creating something small but unique and memorable. There can be a temptation to get ambitious in terms of the scale of your story. Then you get overwhelmed with logistics and you end up making a little epic that sucks. You're better off if you proiritize in order to make sure you get the basic important things just right.

My take on the film/video thing is that video (at least at this point) can't really compare with film in terms of overall qualtity. But there are other factors besides slickness that video can offer such as a sense of intimacy and immediacy that you can't get with film and a big crew. So if you decide to shoot video you should tailor the whole idea to the advantages that video has - you can run around with the camera and get into very cramped places and create a sense that what is happening on screen is real. I think that to focus on trying to light video to pass it off as film is the wrong approach.

Basically I'd say that whatever budget you have or medium you're shooting on, the end result should feel like it was done using the best possible technique for that story. So if you shoot on video you should try make something that couldn't and shoudn't have been made any other way even if you did have more money and a Panavision camera package. When the audience watches a movie they don't care about the budget or the format as long as the whole thing just works