Fundraising options for short film?

GWC Community GWC Hive Mind
#1

This is a bit of an open ended question, Hive Mind, so bear with me…

Last quarter, I took a class called ‘Sci-Fi Prototyping’ in which all of the students were challenged to write sci-fi short stories as a means to explore a social or ethical issue surrounding robots in the near-ish future. The class turned out to be a huge success, and now this quarter we are continuing on, attempting to turn one of the stories into a shot film to (hopefully) be shown at Norwescon as part of a talk on this new prototyping method.

Sounds cool, right? Right. Now’s where it gets iffy, though. We have zero budget at this point. You can imagine how this might be a problem, what was the fact that it typically costs money to make a film.

So on to the question: does anyone in the Hive Mind have any suggestions on ways to go about fundraising for such a project in a relatively short timeframe? We’re looking to start production by late January or early February, so we can’t do one of these super slow burn fundraisers. Any methods any of you have tried for similar projects in the past & had success with?

#2

Sorry to be the voice of reason…

1st - How much money do you need? until you do a budget you don’t even know where the target is.
i would also do three budgets… small med and large. the chances of getting a lot of money in the time allotted is small but at least you know.

2nd - if your script requires products or locations, i would hit those places for money in return for a credit and screen time for their business and /or product.

3rd. - spike lee filmed ‘do the right thing’ on his credit cards. i would not suggest this avenue, but many have used it.

keep us posted… you never know, there are a bunch of hive mind folkes that have jobs and could use a tax write off.

#3

A popular site for funding is www.kickstarter.com. From books to board games to food to music to art and beyond, it’s a site that uses crowdsourcing to help people get their projects off the ground. I’ve supported a few different ones, most recently a beehive expansion project in Crockett, California, though I’ve mostly stuck to album recording projects.

Be careful to read the guidelines for starting a project, though. Kickstarter takes a 5% cut and a big part of success there is your pitch video and the rewards. Many filmmakes still have to use methods like friends, family, and credit cards, but you may be able to get some extra cash this way as well if the idea is good enough.

You get to set the deadline for when to stop taking offers, too, so you could start, say, Wednesday, and set it to end on February 15th, or whatever fits your timeline.

Good luck!

#4

Hey, voices of reason are always welcome. This is a totally new experience for all of us involved.

Re 1: At this point, we’re kind of leaning towards the ‘backwards’ approach, to be honest. Considering the size of this endeavor (just a few classmates & an instructor doing a small educational project), we’re realistically going to need to let our production be dictated by whatever we’re able to get together.

Re 2: This is definitely something we can look into. With the story taking place in 2030, it might be a bit more challenging to get away with placement, but it might work.

Re 3: I don’t think this is something we’d do. It’s enough of a gamble in cases like the one you described where the producers aren’t guaranteed to get something back. In our case, given the nature of the project, it’s pretty much guaranteed that there won’t be any returns.

As for the GWCers avenue, my group has toyed with the idea of crowdsourcing the fundraising using a service like IndieGoGo, but some of us have been hesitant to go in that direction. It’s still something that’s on the table, though, depending on how other things turn out.

#5

Seconding Kickstarter. It’s the go-to place for fundraising lately, but as Jarathen mentioned it’s not a promotional place in itself.

You’re going to want to establish a presence for the the film online: website, twitter, etc. Reach out to people and engage them.

You should also check with any theater groups, film schools, etc. to see if they have expertise/equipment/locations that could minimize costs. Fanfilm projects are great for this because they’ve usually done that kind of legwork, but I can’t think of any in your area (Odd that. Maybe they just go to Vancouver and get paid for it?)