Filmmakers, you’ve been lied to. Film school has taught you to pitch the WHAT about your project — WHAT is the story, WHAT is the cast, WHAT are the target group for the film etc — but the WHAT is not the most important element when it comes to crowdfunding. The WHY is! You see it comes down to your likability on camera. ‘But I’m cool and I’m a great filmmaker’ I hear you say. While that’s good for you, that’s not why people want to engage with your crowdfunding campaign.
One of the many signs I encountered on my morning path today: pic.twitter.com/X7v11HRwn9
— Ted Hope (@TedHope) October 15, 2014
Currently, I’m crowdfunding on Kickstarter for The Quantified Self, an experimental story about a family that records and analyzes everything about themselves. It’s my third science-fiction film mainly because where I grew up science fiction represented hope for something better. Just twenty years ago I was a humble physics student at Kharkov State Polytechnic University in the former Soviet Union. When I came to the US I had to start from scratch like every immigrant. My first job was $4.75 an hour working at a hardware store on Coney Island. It took me 15 years to get a stable job in IT on Wall Street. It also took me 15 years to realize that I was moving away from myself. I felt depressed and confused. Having a job I didn’t like eroded me from inside and made me rather passive and ignorant about the world around me. Something was missing.
Crafting a brilliant script. That’s all it takes to get a project noticed and “green lit”. This was my single-minded approach when I got the bright idea to start skipping down the indie filmmaking road. It was all so clear; admittedly up hill but I saw no potholes or wreckage to avoid. Nope. Curious sights and comfortable, clean rest areas amply stocked with fresh toilet paper lined my highway. The horizon seemed practically at arms length. My first detour: I had as much interest in writing a screenplay as Hunter S. Thompson probably did with the idea of writing sober.
Four years after my original guest post “Navigating Rejection With Grace” (May 10, 2011) we’re still navigating plenty of rejection (c’mon, does that really ever end!?) but also proud to share some “wins” – seven years in-the-making! Our doc FINDING HILLYWOOD (www.findinghillywood.com) has screened at more than 60 festivals around the world, and is available on iTunes (and a myriad of other digital platforms) this month!
It’s Buster’s birthday. Celebrate it with this:
