The Edinburgh Interactive Festival has now opened its inbox to submissions from developers and publishers for its Screenings programme.

New to the programme this year will be the opportunity to show off games-related short films, machinima (animation put together using game engines) and animations. These will be shown in between screenings.

The screenings themselves make up the consumer face of the EIC, giving developers and publishers slots of 45 minutes to an hour to pimp their upcoming wares. Gamers get the chance to meet the guys behind the games and take a peek behind the curtain of games development. Titles such as BioShock, Crackdown, Age Of Conan, Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, Haze, Colin McRae: DIRT and Crysis have all been shown off through the programme in the past.

“We try to offer a very broad range of games and topics”, says EIF's screenings director, Brian Baglow. “Everything from the latest sports, racing and fighting games on console, through to the more complicated PC titles, handheld, mobile, online, casual and indie games. We want to showcase the best new games no matter which platform they appear on - and we want to hear from everyone with exciting new titles.

“The new short film and machinima feature is something we previewed last year and it proved so popular with the audience, this year we want to expand it to offer new content on screen between every session. Again we want to hear from anyone with material they would like to showcase, ideally related to games, or which were created using game technology.”

To get involves, e-mail Brian Baglow brian@indoctrimat.com.

You can see the announced line-up for EIC here.