Thursday, December 1, 2011

Crowd Funding

Aries, my new creative and business partner, plan to start publicizing a crowd funding campaign we created for our first film. Our producer mentioned crowd funding a while back. When he did, I knitted my brow and figured I'd get to understand what he's talking about in due time. I had other questions to ask.

A few weeks ago, Aries and I attended an independent filmmakers conference, in which it became clear that crowd funding should be at the top of the priority list, not something to put off. In these days of austerity, arts funding is drying up. We've applied to several arts councils. Judging from the experience recounted by the conference's panelists about their own applications to arts councils, I'm not optimistic about ours. (I picked a great time to get into an industry that relies on government grants.)

Not to worry, most of the panelists said. These are also days of online community. Make your project look interesting, put a campaign together on a crowd-funding site, publicize it, tweet about it, and your community of supporters will grow. The dissenting voice, however, cautioned that overzealous crowd funding filmmakers risk straining friendships. I was happy to hear this because I don't know if I have it in me to tweet.

Anyway, our crowd funding campaign will kick off today, light on the zeal:

http://www.indiegogo.com/Skin?a=276633


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