Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Crowd-Funding

[hearthesilence]

For most art films, crowd funding just plain sucks. The successful ones usually play strongly to a specific paying audience, but anything without a rabid "fan base" just can't expect much. I love Wiseman but it's not like he's got a millennial following or anything, and his institutional subjects generally don't have that kind of audience either. It's a shame and it sucks.

[TMDaines]

A lot of these failed Kickstarters just show how out of touch many older artists are with the rest of the world. Very few nowadays are gonna leap at the chance to part with $30 just to stream your film - no matter what their opinion of your previous work. The whole point of crowdfunding is to get the money up front by offering a respectable deal that people will want to buy into. The aim isn't to squeeze as many of your committed fans for as much dollar as possible.

[zedz]

Yes, and Hertzfeldt's Kickstarter really shows other filmmakers how to do this right: straightforward goals (with information about what's already been completed and what remains to be done); a range of rewards that are strong value propositions for the amount pledged; clear stretch goals at the ready, expressed in a timely manner; good communication.

Much as I love Wiseman, his campaign is over-reliant on rewards that are essentially valueless and intangible (a PDF, a stream of the film) or of dubious value to most potential investors (tickets to a New York screening: great if you live in New York but not so great if you don't) and, at any rate, offer weak value (I'm sure the film will eventually be able to be viewed for less than $30). It also has that unfortunate air of a project which is definitely going to be completed whether the Kickstarter succeeds or not, so there's no real sense of urgency. If a DVD or BluRay of the film had been factored into the rewards, and had even been the focus of the fundraising, they'd have a much more tangible hook. I'm a huge Wiseman fan, but I don't stream and I don't fly to New York for random film screenings (and I don't need a tote bag), so there's nothing about this campaign that motivates me. And I'm sure there are a lot of other potential investors in exactly the same situation.

[Calvin]

I wonder about Hertzfeldt not including special features already available on DVD - surely they would fit and I'm guessing it wouldn't cost any extra to add them if they already exist? Anyway, I opted for the $120 reward. I'm already looking forward to getting the print framed!

Another particularly bad crowdfunding effort is for Haile Gerima's Yetut Lij, which doesn't even offer a copy of the film itself among its reward options.

[Max von Mayerling]

Tommy Stathes is running a Kickstarter campaign (with a modest $5,600 goal) to release a 2nd volume of Cartoon Roots.

[Luke M]

There have been a couple of interesting failures recently.

Abel Ferrara managed to raise less than 5% for SIBERIA, whilst Frederick Wiseman is sure not to reach his funding goal for IN JACKSON HEIGHTS with less than 25% raised and a day to go.

I can't say I'm sad to see Wiseman fail: $30 for access to a streaming copy with a 10 day limit feels scummy.

I'm scratching my head over one of the rewards for SIBERIA: "Receive your very own watermarked and signed, by the cast and crew, digital copy of SIBERIA."

[kidc85]

One of the chaps from Nitrateville, Edward Lorusso, has a new Kickstarter up. He's done this a few times before and it's been a really interesting run of projects. Essentially he pays the LoC (or a private collector in this instance) to scan an unreleased-on-home-video silent, he commissions a composer and then rewards his backers with the DVD(-R, I believe). This time around it's for the Cecil B DeMille / Gloria Swanson flick FOR BETTER, FOR WORSE.

[Matt]

The Bob Mizer Foundation has a Kickstarter, their third, to raise money to preserve Mizer's photographic slides (link NSFW). Rewards for pledges $50 and up include DVDs of Mizer's films. Unlike many Kickstarter projects, theirs are very professionally run and transparent about where your money is going and what it's being used for.

[oh yeah]

I was disappointed, if not surprised, that Ferrara's SIBERA kickstarter didn't come close to reaching its goal. Crowd-funding platforms like KS are tailor-made for marginalized provocateurs like Ferrara who increasingly can't find financing and distribution, and yet at the same time they're bound to disappoint, because Ferrara's still too marginal and little-known to raise half a mil. I hope he gets the picture made somehow, though, because it does sound interesting -- probably the least "Ferrara-esque" sounding project he's ever worked on. I'm not totally sold on all the films he's made after 'R Xmas, but they're still always interesting and totally unique. And what he had going on from 1990-2001 wasn't a fluke but a sustained artistic peak, enabled by an atmosphere unusually welcoming to offbeat indie/arthouse fare, and a demonstration of the brilliance that he clearly must still have in him. Many have blamed Ferrara's late-90s supposed "downward spiral" on the absence of screenwriter Nicholas St. John, yet I find The Blackout, 'R Xmas and especially New Rose Hotel to be among Ferrara's very best works, and they had nothing to do with St. John (not to mention Bad Lt., with much credit to Zoe Lund). Admittedly, St. John did bring a sort of coherence and astonishing intelligence and clarity to films like The Addiction and The Funeral, but Ferrara's dreamier, more opaque visions without him aren't inherently deficient for lacking this quality. I still haven't seen Pasolini, but I think Ferrara surely has at least one more great film left in him, if he can gather up the support to produce it.

[knives]

As talked about before his failure probably has more to do with misjudging what an audience wants from a crowd funded project then anything to do with his present standing.

[cartoonsonfilm]

I simply wanted to chime in here and thank everyone here (there have been a few of you) who has helped with my Cartoon Roots Blu-ray Kickstarter. It's much appreciated! The initial project goal has been met in just under a week, which is incredible. There is still a month left in the campaign.

I've posted an update to let everyone know how extra funds collected will continue to be helpful to the project, and how contributing is still a good way to pre-order the collection:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/to ... ts/1315941" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Best,
Tommy

[oh yeah]

As talked about before his failure probably has more to do with misjudging what an audience wants from a crowd funded project then anything to do with his present standing.

That's true, yeah. But ultimately it's just unlikely that a filmmaker like Ferrara -- beloved by a relatively small cult but mostly known by others, if at all, as that "scuzzmeister" (to quote J. Hoberman) who made the weird movie where Harvey Keitel got naked and did drugs -- would be able to raise anywhere near half a mil on KS. He never really broke through to the mainstream, no matter how popular King of New York remains with hip hop musicians or how praised Bad Lt. is in certain quarters -- but neither has he ever been widely acknowledged and accepted by a lot of people as some sort of interesting "personality" to watch a la Tarantino or Korine or Herzog, either, which often gives lower-budget filmmakers a surge of popularity. Maybe from 1990-1993 Ferrara had a certain moment of fame (it seemed to be demolished by the unfairly maligned though admittedly abrasive Dangerous Game, which Madonna publicly trashed)... but now he seems to be almost exclusively for those cinephiles who admire the raw intensity and anti-Hollywood Cassavetes-esque roughness of his films. These very qualities, though, are precisely what alienate most people, and said people are not likely to get on board with his increasingly shambling, abstract recent films, no matter if Dafoe stars (he'd probably need some great ensemble cast a la The Funeral, with Walken and Rossellini et al, to get something as seemingly obtuse as Siberia much more than 5k on KS these days).

[knives]

Of course it has to be acknowledged that half a million is a difficult amount for anyone to raise via crowd funding. Maybe there have been some who have, but even the Hertzfeldt example which is doing so well isn't going to make anywhere near that amount.

[A]

Yeah, half a million is difficult, but I think Ferrara could manage that with a decent campaign.

I'm a huge Ferrara fan myself, but didn't have to think five minutes about NOT contributing anything to his campaign after taking a good look at it. Simply because it merely seemed like a pathetic excuse for getting some money - and nothing else. I mean, even if I somehow received a plain e-mail from his production company asking straightforwardly for a donation of 50 bucks for his next film, I might have been more inclined to chime in. But this was just pathetic.

But if he actually tried to understand how Kickstarter and similar sites work and put up a campaign which displayed some sort of effort and interest in this whole social media thing, I'd be more than happy to give him a big chunk of my hard-earned money.

[TMDaines]

I am not sure if this a parody of Graze and the cooking boxes or not!

Cheese Posties

[A]

I am not sure if this a parody of Graze and the cooking boxes or not!

Cheese Posties

Hilarious!

[Raymond Marble]

I got my package of rewards from Christopher Doyle's Kickstarter today. Anxious to crack into the DVD, though I may not get a chance before day's end.

In weirdly related news, I just found out last week that Doyle is acting as DP on Alejandro Jodorowsky's current project, Endless Poetry. This is great news--an unlikely combination of one of my favorite directors (Chilean, who most often works in France) and one of my favorite cinematographers (Australian, who most often works in Hong Kong). I've given money to exactly half a dozen crowdfunding campaigns in my life, and Doyle's film was one and Jodo's another, just a couple of weeks apart. Odd to find that they're actually working together now.

[Calvin]

Doesn't look like it'll reach its goal of $100k, but I just came across a Kickstarter for an Emily Dickinson documentary called Phosphorescence. It's from the production company Hurricane Films and is designed to be a companion to Terence Davies' upcoming Dickinson biopic A Quiet Passion. Rewards include a DVD of A Quiet Passion signed by Davies, a copy of the script or a set of props from the set.

[Ashirg]

Tommy Stathes is running a Kickstarter campaign (with a modest $5,600 goal) to release a 2nd volume of Cartoon Roots.

This campaign just got elevated to $14,000 to release a second set

[kidc85]

Alex Cox is raising funds for an ultra-low-budget take on the Gunfight at the OK Corrall, called TOMBSTONE RASHOMON.

Of course it has to be acknowledged that half a million is a difficult amount for anyone to raise via crowd funding. Maybe there have been some who have, but even the Hertzfeldt example which is doing so well isn't going to make anywhere near that amount.

Interestingly, Jodorowsky has done it. His first on Kickstarter raised $440k (initial aim was $350k) and his latest on Indiegogo (linked by Raymond Marble above) has so far raised an additional $100k, with a week to go. I wonder how many of his backers are fans of DANCE OF REALITY or whether he's getting funding based on the reputation of films made two decades+ ago?

[Lemmy Caution]

Watched Difret, an Ethiopian film about a 14 year old girl who refuses to become an abducted child bride.
Based on a true story. The final end credits listed about 200+ Kickstarter Contributors. First time I'd seen that.

[domino harvey]

Blue Like Jazz and God Help the Girl also listed their Kickstarter et al backers in the credits, I think Veronica Mars did too

[elayman]

Yeah, half a million is difficult, but I think Ferrara could manage that with a decent campaign.

I'm a huge Ferrara fan myself, but didn't have to think five minutes about NOT contributing anything to his campaign after taking a good look at it. Simply because it merely seemed like a pathetic excuse for getting some money - and nothing else. I mean, even if I somehow received a plain e-mail from his production company asking straightforwardly for a donation of 50 bucks for his next film, I might have been more inclined to chime in. But this was just pathetic.

But if he actually tried to understand how Kickstarter and similar sites work and put up a campaign which displayed some sort of effort and interest in this whole social media thing, I'd be more than happy to give him a big chunk of my hard-earned money.

Ferrara has a special gift for biting the hand that feeds him for sure. Unfortunately I'm not surprised at all he has been so frank in interviews about preferring to go through big time investors for financing over general public "slobs" who have less money then himself. So why attempt crowdfunding at all if you have a more lucrative route lined up, which he apparently does, also leaves me scratching my head. Unless it is all a big show to demonstrate to certain investors that you have gone the extra mile to scrape the bottom of the barrel with every possible appeal which could very well be the case. We'll see. Or arrange another film starring billionaires like Devereaux who can hand over a check for the entire amount no questions asked.

[Adam X]

The kind folk at IndieGoGo suggested that we extend the film's campaign by a month so as to raise more than the modest sums so far achieved. We took their suggestion, and as you will see there are still 27 days to go on the TOMBSTONE RASHOMON campaign. Clearly we've raised less money than we did for BILL THE GALACTIC HERO -- but can we make a film with what we've raised so far - and with what we hope to raise over the next 27 days?

The answer is yes. On a budget of this nature some things will be different: we probably won't be able to pay people (which is a significant difference), and the script will have to be intensely honed to make the picture work. As with BILL, we'll be relying on student (or recent graduate) actors and crew. Maybe there won't be a time machine, either! But we'll make TOMBSTONE RASHOMON come what may, and believe you will be happy with the diverse results. Stay tuned for developments!

So far, he's only raised 59% of the relatively low $50,000.

[repeat]

Couldn't find this mentioned here yet: a new Kickstarter project from American Genre Film Archive in association with Something Weird Video.