This is our final excerpt from James Cooper’s eBook www.kickstarterforfilmmakers.com. Today James offers suggestions on how to structure your personal Kickstarter page.
by James Cooper
Campaign Body
The body text of your campaign page is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle, and should receive your full attention to detail when deciding what information to put in, and how to present it. This is where you pitch people on your film and sell them on why they want to be a part of it.
What is it about?
This is where knowing how to pitch comes in handy. You remember pitching, don’t you? The practice of distilling your story down to one or two sentences so you can quickly tell people what your film is about? I know you hate it, but it’s an essential skill, and one you’re going to have to put to good use here. For the purpose of your crowd funding campaign, a good pitch should read like the back of a DVD case, or like the description that comes up when you’re flipping through films On Demand. What’s most important is that the characters and story of the film are clear and easy to understand, as well as the genre. You’re selling your film to people who haven’t seen it yet, so you’d better be able to hook them!
Here’s another excerpt from James Cooper’s eBook www.kickstarterforfilmmakers.com. This time James’ has some advice about how to manage your crowdfunding campaign and the rewards to offer.
by James Cooper
Campaigning as a Team
Up until this point, we’ve been under the assumption that you’re acting as a one person band for your film’s campaign, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Assuming you’re not the Writer/Producer/Director/Director of Photography/Editor/Actor, there should be others involved in the making of the film that have a vested interest in seeing the project come to life, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be combining your efforts to maximize the odds of success.
Successfully running a crowd funding campaign can become the equivalent of a second job, and spreading the responsibility around to multiple members of your team can take some of the weight and pressure off you to be on your game 24/7. You’ll all have to do your own social media posting, but alternate outreach can be divided up to help maximize efficiency and give you a few minutes to breath, which is a welcome opportunity when you’re in the trenches of a campaign.
The other great thing about campaigning as a team is
James Cooper has written an eBook all about Kickstarter, compiling what he learned over the course of his own project. He’s kindly letting us reproduce some of it here for you. Look out for two more excerpts next week, and check out his book at www.kickstarterforfilmmakers.com
Kickstarter For Filmmakers
by James Cooper
Is crowd funding right for me and this project?
Seems simple, and probably a little obvious, but you’d be surprised by the number of campaigns that are launched without ever taking this into consideration. As I said before, crowd funding is not free money, and success isn’t made possible through the simple act of having a campaign. There are several questions to ask that will lead you to determine if you should be pursuing a crowd funding campaign or not:
Is the film interesting to people who aren’t working on it?
This is possibly the toughest question to ask, because people don’t like to consider the idea that they have a project that doesn’t really have an audience. Many filmmakers, are guilty of making films for themselves. This works when you’re footing the bill yourself, but when you’re looking for money from outside sources, you’re going to need elements that hook your potential audience. This may be a killer story, a unique way of making the film (stop motion, green screen, etc.), or noteworthy cast/crew (or anything else you can think of that makes your project stand out), etc. Preferably, you’ll have a combination of things.
The key here is to make sure you have a project that will catch not only the eyes of family and friends, but also their friends, people who follow you on Twitter, and complete strangers that may happen by your campaign by any of a hundred different ways.
With all of the filmmakers on the panel confirming that much of their pledges came from their family and friends, I wondered: Does a successful Kickstarter campaign mean that a film has a built-in audience or just a really supportive network?
For our panelists it was a mixture of both but each was able to go beyond their family and friends. Here are some of the ways they did so:
One day we’ll say “I remember the film industry before crowdfudning existed,” and newcomers will drop their jaws in disbelief. Kickstarter has made a quick and lasting impression on the industry, opening doors for filmmakers who have reached the end of their fundraising and grant writing ropes. Countless movies have been made that wouldn’t have been made without Kickstarter – many of which have left a significant mark in the festival circuit, in theaters and in our homes. One of the more recent trends that I’m intrigued by is the bevy of films Kickstarting to raise funds for theatrical distribution. Urbanized, My Reincarnation, Tchoupitoulas, Detropia and, more recently, Taiwan Oyster, Starlet and The Waiting Room (the latter 3 are currently active) have been green-lighting their own theatrical releases. With their success, I’m sure many more filmmakers will follow suit in the coming months.
Whether you’re raising funds for a portion of your budget or you’re trying to get your movie seen on the big screen following a robust festival reception, here are some factors to consider before you launch:
As a film producer I find that each production I work on has its own unique set of challenges and the process can feel a bit like a roller coaster ride at times. Yet somehow things always seem to work out, and hopefully after its done you feel you’ve learned something or become stronger at what you do. With STARLET undergoing finishing work and getting ready to be released later this year I’ve thought back on some of the recent close calls and other experiences we survived during the making of the film and how fortuitous many of them seem to be in hindsight. Here are five examples which I hope will help other filmmakers in some shape or form.
1. The right place at the right time
While developing another project STARLET director Sean Baker,
We’re nearing the end of an ambitious Kickstarter campaign for an independent film, “The Sisterhood of Night.” Adapted from a short story by Pulitzer prize-winning author Steven Millhauser, our movie is a modern twist on the Salem witch trials. It deals with teen girls and the wild west of the Internet, its potential for casual, breathtaking cruelty, and its capacity to connect and share – all slippery new challenges to this transitional generation. "The Sisterhood of Night" is about holding close what makes you different, through diversity of thought and culture. It shines a light on the dangers of cyberbullying, but it also suggests that there are ways of using the Internet to find your inner creative spirit and tap into positivity.
But this journey began a few years ago. When my producing partner, Elizabeth Cuthrell, and I first met director Caryn Waechter and screenwriter Marilyn Fu, we fell in love with their irrepressible energy and their quest to find beauty, fun, and meaning in the dark edges of life. We worked for a couple of years with Caryn and Marilyn, further adapting the original material from an 80's setting to our contemporary digital world.
Despite our passion–having a first time feature director and deeply female material, and a teen cast with no vampires–we found it hard to gain traction with the conventional ways of financing. It’s no surprise that women are more likely to green light women's pictures, have more confidence in women directors, and be more interested in stories about female characters. The scarcity of women at the top of the business-end of the film industry could have a lot to do with the fact that women made up only 5 percent of directors in Hollywood in 2011.
In addition, the issue of entry and retention in our industry for independent filmmakers, women filmmakers, and diverse filmmakers is a very serious matter. It takes someone with real vision in the studio executive's chair, and strong-minded passionate producers, to push back against the mediocre middle ground which studios tend to feed.
With crowd funding, audiences now have a vehicle to push back as well. Kickstarter and other crowd funding sites provide an opportunity for individuals to influence the development of independent film projects at the ground level, and give these films the momentum they need to go into or finish production, with or without Hollywood’s consent. Audiences can vote with their dollars and contribute to the development of projects, rather than just be mere consumers at the end of the line.
Last year saw Dee Rees’ Pariah break out of the pack at Sundance to be picked up by Focus Features, making it the first film in Kickstarter’s two year history to do so. The 2012 Sundance festival unveiled a total of seven out of fourteen Kickstarter narrative and documentary film projects by women directors and co-directors, including Aurora Guerrero’s Mosquita y Mari, Alison Kayman’s Ai WeiWei: Never Sorry; Lisanne Pajot’s Indie Game: The Movie; Erin Greenwell’s My Best Day; Katie Aselton’s Black Rock and Valerie Veatch’s Me.
And for The Sisterhood of Night, beyond getting financial momentum for the project itself, the biggest reward of our campaign has been the community we are building around our movie.
We’ve been impressed by the number of women directors backing us in order to help another woman director. Katherine Dieckmann, director of “Motherhood,” emailed to say, “I absolutely want to back this, so count me in, and I’ll pledge right now… I teach so many amazing young female filmmakers at Columbia (and they are super-diverse, often coming to me from everywhere from Russia to Laos) & it breaks my heart when they can’t get their projects made.” Other women directors who are backing Sisterhood include Mary Harron, Mehreen Jabbar, Katja von Garnier, Maggie Greenwald, Gina Prince Bythewood, Mira Nair, Tina Mabry, Pamela Yates, Sara Terry, Lilly Scourtis Ayers, Angela Tucker, Stephanie Wang-Breal, Ursula Liang, Suzi Yoonessi, Joyce Dragonsky and we’re still counting!
While our director, Caryn has been tirelessly shooting and editing videos for our campaign updates (you can see them all on our Kickstarter page), our screenwriter Marilyn Fu tapped into her Taiwanese-American community, and they in turn showed huge support for Marilyn’s unique voice as well as for positive cultural images in the media. One of the Sisterhood characters is Taiwanese American, loosely based on Marilyn’s teen years growing up in Berwyn, Pennsylvania.
Through this Kickstarter campaign and a teen art contest we’ve created called Wanna Know A Secret?, we’re using social media in a way that wouldn’t have been imagineable a few years ago. And because of this, we have no doubt, our movie will be deeper and evermore far reaching.
Kickstarter has filled a real need in bringing people together to fund the projects they want to create, and the results have been — and continue to be — amazing. Kickstarter is expecting to bring in a total of $150 million in funding this year – more than the $146 million provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Last weekend we surpassed our goal of $100,000 and we will continue to receive pledges thru March 10th, the last date of the campaign. Now we want to keep building our Sisterhood community, reaching out to our audience, and discovering new supporters. We plan to start shooting this summer, and the funds that continue to come in during this final week will get us that much closer to the final film. By pledging as little as a dollar you can become a member of the Sisterhood, privy to all of our progress updates as we bring this movie to your screen -whatever size that may be! Every pledge at every reward level proves that we are a fan-funded film that has found an audience before the director has even called "Action!"
Feel free to share wildly. Who knows what other discoveries we will continue to make together?
Lydia Dean Pilcher is founder of Cine Mosaic, a production company making independent feature films with an energetic focus on provocative and entertaining stories that promote social, cultural and political diversity. Pilcher has produced over 30 feature films and is currently in post production with The Reluctant Fundamentalist, directed by Mira Nair, based on the highly acclaimed novel by Mohsin Hamid. Also upcoming for production is Fela: Music is the Weapon, which she developed at Focus Features with Steve McQueen set to direct.
