“Based in Vancouver, dana.io is a new crowdfunding platform for international filmmakers, artists, and activists. Unlike other platforms, dana.io doesn’t
Tag: crowdfunding
A creative life is a precarious thing. Actions occur that could profoundly effect your ability to earn a living doing what you love. We get blindsided again and again, sometimes not recognizing things until they are too late to alter them. It’s one of the reasons I have tried to meticulously track for you what are the good thing and bad things happening in indie film these days. Yet, it seems to me we all need to do a better job of tracking them if we don’t want to get trapped in a future we won’t be part of..
My thought is that we should be able to define a series of issues in which we can put events, ideas, and articles into as they occur, helping each other stay on top of them.
The first step is to define the issues. That is what I am doing today .
By Steven C. Beer
In the marketing and distribution of independent films, the most critical and frequently overlooked key to success is the building of an audience. Whether you pursue traditional or alternate distribution platforms, or a combination thereof, your ability to identify, aggregate and mobilize an audience base directly impacts the prospect of your project’s success. Timing your audience building campaign is crucial. According to Jason Ward of Candy Factory Productions, you must begin to target and recruit your supporters the minute you decide to produce a film. Audience building is a slow and steady process that can take many months, if not years, so a multi-step game plan that evolves over time can serve as an audience building blueprint. Here are some tips I learned while moderating the Audience Building Panel at the New York Lounge at Sundance 2014:
How do we make it better? How do we make our indie film infrastructure work for more filmmakers and more diverse audiences?
How do we improve things as individuals as well as a community?
This is the season of giving and that’s not a bad place for us to start. I have always liked the idea of buying local, of buying direct — be it from the farmers, artisans, or owner/operators. I have lamented the loss of more intimate connection that all of our innovation delivers. I have always hated shopping and have enjoyed how the internet kept me out of stores, but there have been some stores, notably book stores, video stores, and record shops, that I enjoyed and now miss dearly. The only online phenomenon that gives me the same rush I got when I discovered from those “stores of old” something I did not know about and simply needed to have is… crowdfunding sites.
There is such a unique pleasure in making something happen. It is an even greater pleasure when you give to an artist that you admire.
This gift giving season I am going to give to twelve artists via their crowdfunding campaigns. I hope
Okay, I am disappointed. Again. This is 2013. It’s not what I thought the future would look like. Don’t get me started, but I did think things would be better for us, and certainly in the Direct Distribution world. I thought we knew that we were all in this together. I thought we knew that if we shared information it would lift us all up higher. That is why I created this blog after all. But of course if knowledge and information changed behavior, no one would smoke, eat refined sugar, or have unprotected sex. But I digress… I went looking for all the Distribution Case Studies I could find, and have compiled them for you.
Check out “Kickstarter: Fan Empowerment … or Exploitation? “on Metro Magazine on why I think crowdfunding is so powerful – scroll to bottom here to find it: http://www.metromagazine.com.au/magazine/index.html
Part One: The Stuggles You Are Facing and How You Can Cope
By Jon Reiss
Since the collapse of the traditional distribution for filmmakers in 2007 we as a community have been struggling to figure out new solutions of how to monetize our work – in other words: how to make money from our content and create a sustainable living. In this two part series I will reformulate and address some of the problems we are facing – but also present some potential solutions for independent filmmakers. These thoughts come from a creating a series of new presentations on Artistic Entrepreneurship over the past year that I presented at the recent SFFS A2E Workshop (http://www.sffs.org/Filmmaker360/A2E-Artist-to-Entrepreneur.aspx) and this spring’s IFP Filmmaker Labs (http://www.ifp.org/programs/labs/). I welcome your comments!
While there were a number of factors that caused an upheaval of the distribution landscape in 2007 and while there have been many positive signs of improvement, filmmakers and all artists still face an enormously changed market for content.
