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.
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.
About 3 months ago we made the decision to self-distribute BLUEBIRD in North America. From the beginning, our goal was to make an intimate, quietly affecting ensemble drama. For writer/director Lance Edmands, there was a specific kind of feeling he was trying to express with the film. There was a unique sense of loneliness, solitude, and isolation that was linked directly to a region of Northern Maine and the culture that permeates the area. Lance grew up in Maine, and he felt that these melancholy emotions stood in stark contrast with the great rugged beauty of the state. We wanted to explore that conflicted feeling in way that would resonate personally with a viewer. It was important to us to maintain the subtle, quiet tone of the film both in the way we made it and the way we brought the film to an audience. With that in mind, we spent the last year considering various distribution offers and scenarios as we traveled with the film to festivals.
By Sean Durkin
I started writing this post to ask for help with a kickstarter campaign for our new film, “James White,” but what I began to explore became much more personal to me. I started to reflect on the past 10 years and how my partners and I got to this point. Josh, Antonio and I started Borderline Films in 2003 while students at NYU. Our goal was bold, but simple – we would all be directors and we would each make our first feature films exactly the way we wanted to. And so the journey began with us only knowing one thing for sure: that we couldn’t do it alone.
It was a blind, naive ambition, and 10 years later, almost to the day, we were in principal photography on Josh Mond’s film ‘James White’, our third first feature, following ‘Martha Marcy May Marlene’, ’Afterschool’ before that.
By Sheri Candler
Originally published on www.thefilmcollaborative.org
There is a lot of talk in independent film circles about the need to “eventize” the cinematic experience. The thought is that audiences are increasingly satisfied with viewing films and other video material on their private devices whenever their schedule permits and the need to leave the house to go to a separate place to watch is becoming an outdated notion, especially for younger audiences. But making your work an event that can only be experienced in a live setting is something few creators are exploring at the moment. Sure, some filmmakers and distributors are adding live Q&As with the director or cast, sometimes in person and sometimes via Skype; discussion panels with local organizations are often included with documentary screenings; and sometimes live musical performances are included featuring the musicians on the film’s soundtrack, but what about work that can ONLY be enjoyed as a live experience? Work that will never appear on DVD or digital outlets? Not only is there an artistic reason for creating such work, but there can be a business reason as well.
In reading a New York Times piece entitled “The one filmmaker who doesn’t want a distribution deal” about the Sundance premiere of Sam Green’s live documentary The Measure of All Things, I was curious to find out why a filmmaker would say he never plans for this work to show on streaming outlets like Netflix, only as a live event piece. I contacted Sam Green and he was kind enough to share his thoughts about why he likes creating for and participating with the audience of his work and why the economics of this form could be much more lucrative for documentary filmmakers.
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
By Jennifer Phang
When Ted and I spoke about a possible post here, he mentioned that 80% of feature film directors never get to make a second feature. Why is that?
One reason is that it’s difficult to sustain the momentum of a crew. You are creating a whole village around a project which has an indefinite, but definitely finite, lifetime. Morale starts high, because the act of creation is invigorating, and then people get exhausted, because it’s a gigantic process, and along the way the money runs out, because the village grows and every new villager brings new skills and also new needs. And somehow you have to sustain the discipline to find the beauty in every shot, but also the momentum to finish the film.
The first time is not exactly traumatizing, but it can feel catastrophic, especially if you set out with high ambitions. It’s possibly your one chance to
