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I was certainly surprised as many others were when the
“Veronica Mars” crowdfunding campaign took Kickstarter by storm. Now Zach Braff is following suit with his campaign to fund his indie feature
“Wish I Was Here”, and it looks like he will easily hit and likely surpass his goal of two million dollars. It’s certainly encouraging that these high profile projects can take a detour around the traditional model of getting a movie made, but how does that help the small independent filmmaker?
While Kickstarter, IndieGoGo and other online crowdfunding tools are commonplace to many of us, the general public is not familiar with these sites and how they work. There are a lot of people who are hesitant to pledge or give money to make a film or a product online. I certainly know some folks who still don’t feel comfortable purchasing anything online. I wonder how many of the 91,585 ”Veronica Mars” backers gave money to a crowdfunding campaign for the first time? I imagine that the number is pretty high, and the likelihood of that project getting completed is also very high. So not only will these backers eventually get to watch what they were able to make happen with their contributions, but other consumers will see the final product too. This gives serious legitimacy to Kickstarter. I know that I feel good when I back a project, even if it’s a small contribution, and when the project is complete that same warm and fuzzy feeling comes back because you helped that film, album, video game, or piece of art come to life. Many of those backers are going to want to experience that feeling again. That’s how these large profile campaigns will help the smaller ones. They are bringing a much larger audience with them to Kickstarter.
The other thing to keep in mind is that these high profile campaigns make crowdfunding look incredibly easy. In the time I’ve taken to write this, Zach Braff’s campaign has racked up an additional $250K. While most of us rely on our close networks for the initial contributions, he brings a huge fan base from his years on TV, fans of “Garden State”, and over one million Twitter followers. Plus he’s getting a huge amount of free press, which us smaller filmmakers would kill for.
With “Scouts Honor: Inside a Marching Brotherhood”, our documentary project that’s in the “rough cut” stage of post production, we tapped into the built in audience of our subject matter, a musical group that’s had thousands of members and has been entertaining audiences for 75 years. We raised $13K in about two weeks for our initial crowd funding campaign on
IndieGoGo in January of 2012. The money raised was primarily from friends, relatives, and people tied in with the Madison Scouts (alumni, current members, their family members and staff). Our initial plan was to have a series of IndieGoGo campaigns, but since almost all the contributions came from people either connected directly to us or the subject matter we decided to create a way to accept contributions on our own website. IndieGoGo and Kickstarter take a percentage from the money earned, and if we did it ourselves then we could use all of the money raised to make the movie. We’ve raised an additional $22K on
our website. We aren’t done with our documentary yet and more funds are necessary to pay for music rights and other finishing costs so there’s a chance we will venture back to one of the big crowdfunding platforms, but only if we find a way to tap into a new audience, outside of our subject matter.
While some may feel like the “Veronica Mars” & “Wish I Was Here” campaigns are upstaging the smaller projects, in my opinion they are giving more opportunity for the little guy to succeed. We are in the infancy of these new crowdfunding models and I’m certainly anticipating what it will be like a few years from now. Let’s learn from them and apply some of their techniques to our campaigns.
Mac
