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Director Shaka King’s film, Newlyweeds, was included in the Sundance NEXT category for ultra low budget films and secured distribution through Phase 4 Films. Here he discusses the value of participating in filmmaking labs like those from the IFP, making short films, and using Kickstarter to successfully fund the film’s trip to Sundance.

March 1st, 2013

Posted In: crowdfunding, Distribution, Film Festivals

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A continuation of the previous video interview, Writer/Director Edward Burns talks about  the value of using Twitter to connect with his fans and collaborate with them on his projects…to a point. His next project, Winter Spring Summer Fall, is now in production with a Kickstarter campaign planned to help finance the film.

February 28th, 2013

Posted In: crowdfunding, Social Network Marketing

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Australian crowdfunding platform Pozible has been around for almost 3 years, but my first personal experience with it has happened as a backer for my friend Christy Dena’s cross media project AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS. I asked Christy to give me some feedback from her experience as a creator using it to raise $15,000 AUD in hopes that she might help other Australian filmmakers who are considering crowdfunding.

What made you choose to crowdfund on Pozible? Is the majority of your creative team Australian? Where are the majority of your donors located so far?

CD: “It is a predominately Australian team. In the beginning, I was keen to have an international team. But it just became too difficult over distance and there is nothing better than sitting around a table talking about things. I’ve had international people involved – like Juliana Loh from Canada who is doing the art side of things for the iPad prototype.

I investigated going through Kickstarter first– either in the USA or UK. I had family and colleagues who were willing to let me use their bank account (because Amazon Payments requires a local bank account). But Amazon Payments reports earnings over a certain amount to the tax office, and so we couldn’t risk that happening with family and colleagues.

Kickstarter is news. Press are less inclined to talk about a project on some lesser-known platform. There is also the brand-association that comes with Kickstarter – you use Kickstarter if you’re truly international and serious. I think that is what some people think. But Pozible has been going for a few years now, and the Australian public is getting behind it more and more – though not to the degree of Kickstarter. We’re used to buying things overseas, and aren’t good at supporting our own all the time.

That being said, the response internationally has been phenomenal. We have backers from over 14 countries! These backers didn’t care about the platform, they wanted to support the project, support me, support the team. And so that is wonderful. It certainly is easy to use, and doesn’t have the obstacle of Amazon Payments (backers can use credit card and Paypal). So it is more accessible.”

What kind of perks did you choose to offer? I think many filmmakers have a difficult time deciding what to offer outside of DVDs, tshirts, digital downloads etc.

CD: “I spent a long time researching other campaigns and what was offered and therefore what is expected. This was tempered with statistics about what price-points are the most popular. I also figured into the equation production time. While I love tangible products, I didn’t want to spend 1 to 2 months creating and shipping rewards when we needed to get down to work.

I researched buyer psychology around pricing too – the effects of early-bird deals, price points, urgency, and limited offers. And so that is why there is the early-bird pack for instance – though I got the volumes wrong on that one (they should be more limited). In the end it was a mix of all of what I found in my research, production constraints, and just what I enjoy making too.

We have the basic $1 Kudos, $7 App Pack, $25 Soundtrack Pack, $50 Special Creator Pack (which includes the Creator’s Log I will be writing about how we created the whole project) and the Early-Bird $39 version of the Creator’s Pack, $79 Prologue Pack (which gives a specially-created audio prologue), $90 Tester Pack (in which you can be involved in user-testing the next version), $100 In-World Pack (in which people can get an Artist Assassin Profile or A Philosophy Game included in the release); $130 I Want It All Pack (which includes all of the previous); $250 Sponsor Pack (which gives a sponsor branding in the app, as well as 3 apps); and a $350 Consulting Pack (which gives a 2 hour meeting with myself and a crew or cast member). The packs provide a mix of all of the rewards.”

Your pitch video includes some animation which isn’t often used. Who made the animation? How did you decide on this component for your pitch? Will animation be a component of the finished project?

CD: “The animation was created by a talented new member of the team: Simon Howe. He did a fantastic job. I had the issue of needing a good strong video for the campaign, but we don’t have any final art for the websites and I didn’t want to show our prototypes. I needed to get across the concept of what we’re doing, but I didn’t want to just talk to the camera. I personally love animation and thought this would be the most entertaining and effective way to communicate the concept of a web audio adventure.

One of the things I’ve discovered through research and testing is that audio and animation or just audio and drawn imagery is really a perfect marriage. As soon as you have some level of abstraction, the audio and imagery just fold into each other effortlessly. In the project, there will be drawn imagery and some moving elements, but it isn’t an animation project.

I’ll most likely release a de-brief of my crowdfunding experience – the strategies and insights – afterwards. And of course, the Creator’s Log included in our perks will give tons of juicy information about the various influences and creative decisions I’ve made for the project along the way.”

Thanks to Christy Dena and her team for sharing their experience with Pozible so far. I can’t wait to hear how the project turns out!

 

 

February 25th, 2013

Posted In: crowdfunding, transmedia

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This piece by Jeffrey Winter originally ran on the Sundance Artist Services blog on March 22, 2012

We all know that the vast majority of folks make their film-viewing choices based on what they are hearing about a film — be it from friends, traditional media, the blogosphere, or social media. They’re not likely to go out of their way to proactively research a film, and if they haven’t heard anything about a film, they aren’t likely to see it. Whatever you want to call that…be it “buzz,” “word-of-mouth,” “going viral,” etc…it is the name of the game in contemporary grassroots marketing.

But how much can a filmmaker actually control that? We all know the ways they can try – by playing film festivals, hiring publicists, engaging their community via social media, reaching out to organizations, etc. Of course it helps if a film is actually good…really good, in fact….as the last thing today’s marketplace needs is another mediocre film. And the values of passion and hard work can’t be overlooked here either, as creating buzz and engagement for a film is often arduous and time-consuming…and for many filmmakers nearly as daunting as making the movie itself.

Often it feels like independent films are at the whim of the zeitgeist, and the most important aspect is timing, and the receptivity of the marketplace to the ideas in the film. Consider the cycle of elections, and the way political/environmental/social issue docs can explode into national consciousness around certain hot issues. Given the time it takes to make a film, it’s hard to know whether anyone can actually craft a film to hit at just the right time to capture a “trending” topic.

In the case of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize winner AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY, all the factors mentioned above came together in the final months of post-production to land the film this January at Sundance as an unlikely “buzz” film of the Festival. On the surface, it’s a straightforward documentary by a first-time filmmaker about a Chinese artist/ political dissident completely unknown to the majority of U.S. filmgoers. Hardly a guaranteed formula for indie marketing success.

Sundance key art

But just below the obvious, the twitterverse was ablaze promoting the film; the Kickstarter campaign was raising funds and attracting attention; art magazines were giving the film covers; and filmmaker Alison Klayman had already done numerous appearances on CNN, MSNBC, and The Colbert Report as well as print features in the likes of the Wall Street Journal, The Economist and The Hollywood Reporter. A few weeks later (by mid February), the trade publications were filled with the announcement of its purchase by Sundance Selects, and the New York Times was running a feature article about the film’s upcoming Summer 2012 release.

How does something like that happen for a debut filmmaker with no special access to funding, shortly after finishing a film about a Chinese artist?

Well, of course this wasn’t just any artist — Ai Weiwei is an internationally renowned art star and political provocateur whose unyielding criticism of the Chinese government has earned him legions of friends, enemies, and fans alike.  And Weiwei isn’t just an average political dissent, he is a dissident for the digital age, who because of the rigors of Chinese censorship has taken his activism specifically to twitter through linked computers to the West, and therefore has mastered the art of social media all on his own.

This is the study of a modern documentary subject, who is just as likely to be able to spread his/her own message through the media on their own, through the accessibility of social media, even in free speech-challenged China. In this case, it becomes the story of the filmmaker that becomes the mouthpiece of the subject…which many might argue is the way that it should be.

Filmmaker Alison Klayman began her work with Weiwei in 2008, as a recent Brown University graduate living abroad in Bejing and working as a freelance journalist. Her housemate was curating a show of Weiwei’s photography, and Klayman was asked to make a video for the show. Klayman and Weiwei hit it off creatively, and Klayman began to follow Weiwei as his documentarian — capturing his daily life, his frequent battles with the Chinese authorities, and his travels abroad for major international art shows.

Weiwei’s daily use of blogs and videos to spread his artwork — especially his videos criticizing the government’s response to the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province – became a driving narrative in the film, as well as a grassroots vehicle for spreading Weiwei’s fame and fan base. When the Chinese government finally cut off his locally-sourced blog, Weiwei was able to migrate his work to an ungovernable network of twitter-linked computers, untraceable to China. As such, his network was able to dramatically expand globally, while remaining accessible to tens of thousands of Chinese willing to access these quasi-legal networks.

From 2008 thorugh 2010, Klayman’s documentary follows Weiwei through major international art shows, startlingly intimate private moments, and incredible courage in the face of political adversity. And whenever Weiwei had a run in with the Chinese authorities, the encounter went instantly viral, through a devoted staff who filmed his every move and posted it immediately to twitter.

In late 2010, Klayman returned to the States to begin editing, without the financial means to complete the project. As such, in addition to applying for grants, Sundance labs, and bringing well-connected executive producers onto the projects (largely through Weiwei’s connections in the art world), Klayman strategized and launched a Kickstarter campaign, scheduled to go live on March 29th, 2011.  And that’s when the film caught a kind of lighting in a bottle.

Only four days after the Kickstarter launched, Ai Weiwei suddenly disappeared on April 3rd…apparently arrested by the Chinese Government, but without any official announcement or confirmation of his whereabouts. A global outcry went up throughout his social networks, the art world, and then the international press caught on to the story as well.

As a journalist and Ai Weiwei’s documentarian of record, filmmaker Klayman quickly emerged as the “journalist of record” on the Weiwei story, and the international press began flocking in her direction. Suddenly, it was the twitter feeds that Weiwei’s staff and Klayman had been maintaining throughout the documentary filming periods that became the main source of worldwide news for Ai Weiwei updates. Klayman and her social media teams ramped up their efforts in the U.S. and China, and started working on a rotating schedule to provide 24 hour updates on the story for several months. For all of 81 days, as Weiwei’s secret detention continued without any official response from the Chinese government, the international press continued to feature Klayman’s twitter updates on the story, and interviewed her about the story for numerous high-profile news programs.

Of course, Klayman was careful not to try to turn the story into a shameless plug for her movie…after all, her friend and colleague was “disappeared” and detained, and concern for his well-being was the first priority. But inexorably, in today’s hyper-media culture, Klayman’s sudden thrust into the mainstream became completely entangled with the finishing of the film…and catapulted the project into a far larger spotlight.

The film’s Kickstarter soared above the original asking goal of $20,000 to a final tally of $52,175 from 793 backers…even though it was only originally expected to bring in money from friends and family. The film attracted additional producers and lab invitations that Klayman freely admits it probably wouldn’t have. All in all, the film became a “cause célèbre” for an issue in the news, a fact which filmmaker Klayman could hardly have counted on while making the film.

When Weiwei was finally released, with a dubious charge of more than 1 million dollars in tax evasion, support from the community-at-large continued to pour in, with donations to the cause far exceeding the amount of the government fine. And filmmaker Klayman was finally free to turn the enormous pouring of goodwill towards deliberate promotion of the film, helped in large part by the incredible networks built during the crisis on twitter, and to a lesser extent, on Kickstarter and Tumblr. It is also worth noting here: because the Kickstarter campaign included a number of incentives/prizes towards donation, the film now had a wonderful amount of merchandise it could also now leverage towards wider buzz about the film.

Given this backstory, we can demystify the process of how a small film sometimes gains “buzz” beyond expectations…as was clearly the case with AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY and its incredible fortune of timing combined with passion, hard work, technical savvy, and community networks. Sometimes a film that seems the most difficult to market actually has the most subtle niche communities that can be reached…whether they be political activists, art-world enthusiasts, devotees of Asian culture, social media junkies etc.

However, according to filmmaker Klayman, perhaps the greatest takeway is this…. in today’s hyperlinked/hashtagged environment, it is ciritical to remember that today’s documentary subjects no longer solely rely on their documentarian to spread their message, and social media makes potential distributors and activists of us all. Sometimes, today’s filmmakers just need to choose their subjects wisely, and hold on tight for the ride.

Here is Klayman’s interview for Sundance’s Meet the Filmmaker promo videos

 

 

 

April 9th, 2012

Posted In: crowdfunding, Film Festivals, Marketing, Social Network Marketing

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This post originally ran on Sheri Candler Marketing and Publicity’s blog

I am prompted to write this post because I have been hit up many times lately about supporting, advising or donating to various crowdfunding initiatives. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t quite a complaint because I have been known to support many campaigns by doing any one of these things (ask anyone else offering their advice if they have done any of these things by the way, the answer could surprise you). I do get frustrated by the ones who contact me because they have embarked without thinking through the strategy or they are very close to the time limit and very far from their goal. I thought it might be helpful to list out some ways to fail in this endeavor so you can be sure to avoid these mistakes.

1) You do not already a have a support network online. This is a biggie. I know you’re thinking Sheri, how can I already have an audience and supporters of my work when I haven’t raised the money yet to do my work? Do you have a personal identity built up? Does anyone actually know who you are yet? There are many ways to do this, starting with sharing your knowledge and experiences with people and championing others as much or more than you do yourself. This identity building takes time and should be started well in advance of asking for favors. If you don’t have a strong support network of friends, colleagues and people who enjoy the work you do, do not introduce yourself and your project by asking for money.

2) Your goal is unrealistic. At the moment, the highest amount I personally have seen raised is $30K.  That was for a feature and mostly used on principal photography. Most of the other projects I have seen find success are raising under $10K. Crowdfunding is meant to get your project started, get your project finished or be used for something clearly defined like a festival run or your own screening tour. It is not going to be your only source of financing for your feature film. In time, as your audience grows, this could change for you. Unless you have the base of fans mentioned in #1, try raising $5k and see how you do.

3) You do not know who your audience is. In addition to that base of supporters, you will also need to reach those most interested in the kind of story you are telling. Many filmmakers just keep their campaigns limited to targeting other filmmakers. Folks, I don’t know any filmmakers NOT looking for money to fund their projects. While they may love and support you, you must venture out of that pool to find alternate sources for donation. I was asked whether I felt that crowfunding had reached its peak yet. Hardly! Ask any average joe on the street what crowdfunding is and you’ll get a blank stare. These are the guys you need to hit up, the ones who aren”t completely burned out by being bombarded by appeals and who might enjoy what you are doing.

4) Your campaign length is too long. Kickstarter has advised that the most successful campaigns are the shortest. Why? Because you and everyone else you know gets exhausted fundraising for 90 days. The campaign starts off strong (you hope) but somewhere around the 30 day mark it wanes big time! The momentum stalls, people get tired of shilling for you, you get tired of shilling too. Set the goal for 30 days maximum and work it nonstop during that time. Hint: that doesn’t mean your only communication is donation appeals. A reminder or two a day will suffice. The rest of the time, tell us about what you have planned for the project, comment on other conversations, share some useful links. Don’t be a complete pest!

5) Just offer tshirts and DVDs as perks. Nothing meaningful or imaginative. While I usually do not donate based on the perks, but on how well I know the people and how much I believe they can carry off the project, many people are all about the perks. If you are offering the same run of the mill stuff that can be purchased way cheaper at Walmart than at your minimum donation level, you need to think from the greedy donor perspective. I can get tshirts for $5 and a DVD of a film I have actually heard of far cheaper than a donation at the $50 mark. Get creative on what you can give donors that they will actually like, need, and most importantly, talk about. Are you a great cook? Can you do cool magic tricks? Are you a poet (I’m looking at you John Trigonis)? What can you offer your donors that is special to them and won’t cost you much if any money to manufacture?

Anyone else have some mistakes to add? Advice from those in the trenches is always appreciated.

Sheri Candler is an inbound marketing strategist who helps independent filmmakers build identities for themselves and their films. Through the use of online tools such as social networking, podcasts, blogs, online media publications and radio, she assists filmmakers in building an engaged and robust online community for their work that can be used to monetize effectively.

She can be found online at www.shericandler.com, on Twitter @shericandler and on Facebook at Sheri Candler Marketing and Publicity.

October 12th, 2010

Posted In: crowdfunding, Uncategorized

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Here are a few links to some of my favorite crowdfunding case studies. These will give you more ideas on what others did successfully and how they felt about the experience.

King is a Fink http://bit.ly/aUVCqi;  Gary King http://bit.ly/9unWbp; Jacques Thelemaque http://bit.ly/9UyA5o; Coffee and Celluloid http://bit.ly/d3HXgD; @craigmod http://bit.ly/d55B0I ; John Trigonis http://bit.ly/buz4bA

August 20th, 2010

Posted In: crowdfunding

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Remember that the platforms you use to crowdfund have fees associated with collection and access to the marketing tools they offer.  Kickstarter takes 5% of the money raised and Indiegogo takes 9% (but if you reach your goal by a specified time, they will rebate 5%). On top, there are 3rd party fees such as Amazon payments fee or Paypal fees to receive the money you raised. Then, there are your fulfillment costs associated with the perks you offered (DVD copies, tshirts, etc. & postage for these). Take these into consideration when you are figuring out how much you need to raise so you don’t run short.

August 19th, 2010

Posted In: crowdfunding

Tags: , , , , , ,


You must think of fun, interactive and interesting ways of soliciting funds. My friends from Tilt the movie had a really fun way of engaging their donors. They created a map of the town where their film is set and “populated” the town with their backers, complete with fun, made up bios of each one. For $15, a donor could see what kind of creative backstory could be invented for their presence in the story of Tilt. All from the creative minds of the filmmakers.

Think of the target audience of your film, what drives them, what interests them, what can you give THEM for donating? You will find that your donations are easier to get when people feel great about helping.

August 18th, 2010

Posted In: crowdfunding

Tags: , , ,


Ask any filmmaker who has run a successful campaign and he will tell you it was a full time job to get those funds. It is a crusade to exert your goal continuously and strenuously, basically you are bothering and cajoling everyone you know to help get to the goal. You must be committed to doing that to be successful.

Statistically, the shorter the campaign deadline, the faster the funding comes. I know this sounds unlikely, but if you drag out the process beyond 90 days, interest seriously wanes even from those benefitting from the funds. It is just not possible to keep momentum going for a long length of time. Keep it tight and focused.

Remember, Kickstarter’s policy is all or nothing. If you don’t raise your goal amount in the time allotted, you get none of the money pledged. Indiegogo allows you to keep what you raise, but if you raise it in a specified amount of time, there is a rebate on their fees.

August 17th, 2010

Posted In: crowdfunding

Tags: , , ,


This week’s tidbits are from Sheri Candler and will cover her assessments about successful crowdfunding initiatives.

To some artists, crowdfunding looks like easy money. Make a pitch video, give a synopsis and a few perks and let the money roll in. That’s a mistake. To be successful in crowdfunding depends on having a solid foundation of followers, people interested in your work. If you don’t already have a presence on social networking platforms, a well read blog, and/or a large network of friends and supporters, build that first before starting to crowdfund. If you try to raise money before anyone knows you or cares about your project, you will fail to garner interest.

August 16th, 2010

Posted In: crowdfunding

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