Veteran filmmaker, teacher, and fundraiser Mark Stolaroff takes a pause in the middle of the Kickstarter campaign for his new film “DriverX” to reflect on his filmmaking career and the psychology of asking friends and strangers for money. Mark is the creator of the "No Budget Film School” seminars and a role model to many indie filmmakers.
Jen West and James Martin are partners in life, partners in filmmaking (they alternate between directing and producing on each film), and partners in a string of successful crowdfunding projects.
Now they face a new challenge -- distributing their most recent completed film online and on the festival circuit while raising funds for their first feature-length film.
This episode I'm joined by Richard Gale, creator of the short film "The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon," which is on its way to becoming a feature film thanks to a healthy festival run and a rabid YouTube fan base. Learn how Gale turned festival success into a cottage industry and a budget for a feature-length horror comedy.
You probably know that I've been running a crowdfunding campaign at Seed&Spark -- and now we're down to the wire to get to 100%. (The campaign ends 7/29 at 5 pm ET.) In case you’re asking yourself “what’s in it for me?” here are 6 of the best reasons to become a supporter.
Don’t miss this extended chance to grab your piece of history -- join the Film Festival Secrets 2.0 community now!
SOLD OUT! The fee waiver bundle is sold out but you should still join the Film Festival Secrets 2.0 community for other great perks on the festival circuit.
The second edition of Film Festival Secrets: A Handbook for Independent Filmmakers is under construction. Make sure it answers your questions by joining the community that will guide its creation. It all starts Thursday, June 11th with a webinar at 9pm ET. RSVP here.
Since meeting filmmaker and startup founder Emily Best in November, I’ve wanted to get her on the podcast to talk about her company Seed and Spark. This fundraising tool reimagines crowdfunding from the perspective of an indie filmmaker and takes the experience way past fundraising into audience building and distribution.
When Julie Keck & Jessica King (collectively known as "King is a Fink") tell you that they are social media experts, they can do so with straight faces. Chris asks them to speak in sentences with fewer than 140 characters as they talk about the interplay of social media with audience building, crowdfunding, and celebrity encounters on Twitter.
Yes.
A young man in Ohio named Zack “Danger” Brown posted a Kickstarter project in early July with the modest goal of raising $10 to buy the ingredients for a potato salad. With 25 days left in the campaign, Brown has raised more than $30,000 from nearly 3000 backers. What can we learn from Mr. Brown and his crowdfunded bomb of mayo-soaked root vegetables?
By now you've probably heard about the nasty fallout of the delivery of digital downloads to Veronica Mars backers: the disappointed fans and the offers of refunds to backers who ended up buying copies of the film from Amazon and iTunes. It speaks a lot to how much services like iTunes have become the default entertainment ecosystems and the fact that, if you want to try to buck that trend with a Veronica Mars-shaped Trojan horse, the execution had better be flawless.
From The D-Word, an online community for documentary filmmakers.
Long before Facebook, long before Twitter, there was The D-Word.
This year, The D-Word will celebrate its 15th year – a remarkable amount of time for a free online community built on peer sharing to survive, let alone thrive. And thriving we are. With over 10,600 members from 127 countries, we’re a virtual community that truly reaches documentary filmmakers the world over.
In all these years we’ve only gone through one redesign, made possible by the generosity of D-Word members back in 2007. Now, in time for our 15th birthday, we’d like to update our design and functionality, and once again we’re turning to our community to help make that happen. We’ll be launching a 6-week crowdfunding campaign on March 3 with a goal of raising $15,000 to cover the costs of the upgrades. Call it our “15 For 15” campaign.
The D-Word has long been one of my go-to places to gauge the trends and concerns of the documentary film community. If you've never been there and you make docs, you owe it to yourself to go there now. If you're already aware of them, it's time to go back and chip in a few bucks.
I especially like this promise in their list of intended new features: Friendly, modern emails which don't look like they were created in 1999.
Allow me, half-jokingly, to also suggest: A logo bigger than 155x41 pixels.
 | The Better Film Festival Submissions Toolkit has a very simple purpose: to help you improve the way you submit your work to film festivals.
Divided into 7 core tasks with a discussion of each task, the 16-page Toolkit is designed for quick reading and gives you concrete, actionable tasks to make your film submissions package better. Best of all, you'll get the insight you need to better understand what programmers look for and how to submit with confidence. |
