Crowd-sourcing campaign for SA film

Crowd-sourcing campaign for SA film

Great article on Screen Africa today about the campaign on IndieGoGo. Last four days left!! Make sure you become part of this historic venture.

http://igg.me/p/49173?a=206977

Crowd-funding - what in the IndieGoGo am I doing?

Crowd-Funding/Sourcing – Is this the new way to make your movie?

I was lucky enough to encounter Peter Broderick at the Producer’s Forum at the Durban Film Mart this past weekend. He was talking about crowd-funding/sourcing. Peter is President of Paradigm Consulting in the United States, which helps filmmakers and media companies develop strategies to maximize distribution, audience and revenues. He has been an advocate of the ultra-low budget feature film movement and is a passionate advocate of digital film making.

The following piece is put together from notes I made during his impressive presentation at the DFM.

Crowd-sourcing/funding is a concentric way to make money but it is vital that you think of your AUDIENCE before you start you funding campaign. Remember that you have to do everything you can, use every marketing tool in the book, to create AWARENESS of your project. Broderick quoted some examples of how to do this:

• One producer incorporated a number of educational grants into his funding campaign so that the charity aspect of his drive could be emphasised and used to generate goodwill.
• Another successful group put their trailer online and invited people to remix it.
• A woman who wanted to fund her around-the-world yacht trip offered different rewards for certain amounts of money. If people donated $10, she promised them a Polaroid photo taken along her journey. $50 earned them a coconut sent from one of her destinations, and so on.
• Jennifer Fox, who crowd-funded her very personal project called My Reincarnation, sent personal thank-you letters to every single person who donated funds, from the smallest amounts of money to the largest sums.
• Some producers offered Co-Producer Credits for a certain amount of Euros.

What is most important, however, is that the website you create to raise funds has to be FUN and encourage people to come back to the site. The more visitors you attract, the better your chances of raising funds. Don’t fall into the trap of making your website nothing more than a press-kit. NOTHING is more boring than the unchanging dynamic of a press-kit site. Broderick emphasised that it is imperative you keep the following in mind when creating your crowd-sourcing website:

• Fewer words, more PICTURES
• Rich VISUAL content relating to the movie
• Content must be constantly UPDATED – i.e. it must be dynamic
• Harness VIEWER’S INPUT in some way – people want to contribute
• Website must be PERSONAL and written in the first person
• A good VIDEO documenting the journey of the project is a must
• HUMOUR wins the day every time
• Utilize SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES to create awareness of your project

The filmmaker must give actual information about the project on the site. Remember, piracy isn’t your prime concern here but obscurity is. Broderick showed a video example from a Spanish project which raised its funds through crowd-sourcing. The project was called The Cosmonauts and used humour and youthful energy to introduce the genesis of the film to the future audience. He also quoted an example of Neil Gaiman’s The Price which used social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, especially utilizing the #BoingBoing hashtag to create awareness and to raise funds for production.

Broderick referred to a project created by self-confessed Finnish “nerds” who wanted to make a feature which was a spoof of Star Trek. They wrote a rough outline and put the rough draft online. This soon attracted a writer. They then asked for people to contribute special effects skills. In the end, 3000 people across 300 countries contributed to this project which resulted in a 108 minute feature called Star Wreck. 30% of all the images contributed to the film were donated by people around the world who were happy just to be associated with the project. They all received screen credit. The project cost 23 000 Euros in total. The makers of the film knew their audience. They appealed to a niche core audience of like-minded “nerds” such as themselves who would be delighted to contribute to a project they believed in. The final product is free to download but the makers of the film earned 20 times their original budget in revenue through DVD sales. Remarkably, even though everyone could download the film for nothing, people still wanted to own their own copies, especially if the film contained their names listed in the credits.

Another production which used crowd-sourcing successfully was an animation feature produced in Australia about global warming called Coalition of the Willing by Simon Robson. Twenty different companies produced different segments of the film which was made in thirty different sections. Even though each section has a different style, the film fits together as a cohesive whole.

Broderick emphasised that the best way to get people to support a project is if they contribute to the making of the project in some way. It allows them to feel part of something as large as a film.

Broderick spoke at length about host websites such as www.kickstarter.com and www.IndieGoGo.com both of which provide a platform to host crowd-sourcing/funding projects. Both sites set dates for budget targets to be reached. Kickstarter takes a certain percentage of the income as payment but IndieGoGo doesn’t.

Advice for a successful crowd-sourcing website:

• Write the website in the first person to build awareness of the film
• Create a vision for the website that may be bigger than the film
• The website must take on a life of its own
• Make things you can sell that relate to your film
• Create some sort of payback for visitors either through allowing them to download video streams or buy DVDs to related topics or even buy books on your site if they are of similar topics. (Broderick suggests you buy goods wholesale that you can sell retail on the website)
• Try to come up with give-aways or incentives to encourage donations
• Remember your objectives for the site are to build AWARENESS of the project and to RAISE MONEY. Bear this in mind at all times.

Broderick closed the seminar by referring to one of the first ever cases of crowd-sourcing. The first Oxford English Dictionary was a literary example of the crowd-sourcing. People came together from all walks of life to contribute words to this enormous literary work. It is almost certain that none of them was paid.


Tweet
References:

http://www.peterbroderick.com/bio/bio.html

http://coalitionfilm.blogspot.com/

http://www.wreckamovie.com/

http://www.kickstarter.com/

http://www.indiegogo.com/

Daily News

Daily News

Fantastic post - the lead story on The Call Sheet!

Shot at the Big Time is going great guns!

Yippee!

A Shot at the Big Time - Bulletfilm

A Shot at the Big Time - Bulletfilm

A Shot at the Big Time featured on Bulletfilm today.

Catch more details about Online Auditions on http://igg.me/p/49173?a=206977

Become part of a film production with A Shot at the Big Time - a film which will touch the world. | PRLog

Become part of a film production with A Shot at the Big Time - a film which will touch the world. | PRLog

Eve's Apples: 'A Shot at The Big Time' - Janet van Eeden's dedic...

Eve's Apples: 'A Shot at The Big Time' - Janet van Eeden's dedic...: A Shot at the Big Time.     by  Janet van Eeden Clarence Hutton, Jimmy and David Parkin  In the centre, Jimmy aged 16 going on 17... Our S...

A Shot at the Big Time on Indiegogo - Day 59!

A Shot at the Big Time fund raising campaign was launched on Friday at the 11th hour of the 11th Day of the 11th month in 2011, Remembrance Day.

More big donations have come in this week from Australia and Johannesburg. So touched that people believe in this film! I've also been interviewed by Magda of http://www.bulletfilm.com/ who is featuring a link to the Indiegogo site on this website.

Wonderful Paul Dwyer, one of my former students at the Wildlife Film Academy, donated the services of one his brightest young proteges at his Graphics Design Company, Justin Webber, to create the poster. Not only did Paul do this but he also donated $1000 to the production fund! How generous is that?

Watch this space to see the poster.

There is also a new development which is under wraps for now but I'll let you know as soon as I can.

It's surprised me how much it moves every time anyone contributes $10! It humbles me to think that other people believe in this project as much as I do.

Thank you for all the viewings and comments and reposts and. of course, contributions. I'm sure we'll get somewhere close to the target although it was a very ambitious one, but even if we get a quarter of the proposed target, it will be a wonderful start to the production funding.

Please keep reposting!!!


Tweet


Thank you so much.