Financing
Filmmaking - Financing
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How to Raise Seven Grand in Seven Days on Indiegogo
My film partner and I reached our crowdfunding goal for our documentary film project, The Keepers, last month. I previously wrote about some of the issues and questions about crowdfunding and documentary ethics that came up during our long campaign. This piece is a useful follow-up that explains how we were actually able to beat the odds and raise half of our goal in the final week. This was written with the hopes that other indie filmmakers can apply what we have learned to reach their own fundraising goals. What they say is true By now it’s common crowdfunding lore […]
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How a Water Filter Can Teach You How to Hack Your Kickstarter Campaign
Hacks, four-hour workweek condensations, and digital outsourcing — I’m often dubious about the efficacy of many strategies promising “the answer” when it comes to both creative and business endeavors. That said, “Hacking Kickstarter: How to Raise $100,000 in 10 Days (Includes Successful Templates, E-mails, etc.),” found on the blog of Four-Hour Work Week guru Tim Ferris, is an excellent walk-through of one very successful Kickstarter campaign, and it’s full of practical advice. The Kickstarter was for Soma, a designer water filter, but much of author Mike Del Ponte’s advice can be applied to filmmakers too. I don’t agree with 100% […]
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Frankie Latina’s Killer Kickstarter Campaign
I’ve been a huge fan of Frankie Latina’s since I saw his awesome debut feature, the new wave-tinged exploitation flick Modus Operandi, at CineVegas in 2009. Scott shared my love of the movie and that same summer put Latina on Filmmaker‘s “25 New Faces” list. Modus Operandi came out in 2010, and since then Latina has been somewhat quiet. Until now, that is. Yesterday he launched a Kickstarter campaign for his new film, Snap Shot, with an excellent, attention-grabbing video starring Danny Trejo, who’s one of the leads in Operandi and will also appear in this upcoming project. Latina’s $75,000 target […]
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Seven Questions for People of the Delta Director Joey L.
Is it possible to produce a cinematic narrative based on the collective wisdom of a tribe with no real actors? Can a film be made where true stories are brought to life by the people who have actually lived them? Joey L. not only believes it is possible, he has every intention of making it happen. By the age of 18, he was commissioned to photograph the movie poster for Twilight. Currently his work, on National Geographic’s Killing Lincoln promos, can be seen on billboards from Times Square to Sunset Boulevard. So how does someone who makes a living routinely […]
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First Do No Harm: Lessons and Questions after a Crowdfunding Campaign
Last week, my production partner and I reached our Indiegogo film crowdfunding goal. We worked a ton, both on and offline, spun our wheels a bit, thought we set our goal too high, figured we might be harassing our friends too much, worried we picked the wrong time to fundraise, and grew concerned that our campaign was too long. But, in the end, we were able to course-correct and come out on top, beating the $15,000 goal by some $700, with the last $7,000 coming in the final four days of the campaign. Like anything that really tests your faith […]
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Free the Mind Launches Distro Campaign via Indiegogo
Wanna give the finger to Big Pharma and maybe meet the Dalai Lama? Danish director Phie Ambo’s Free the Mind was one of my big discoveries at IDFA 2012. The film’s a truly revelatory exploration of the mindfulness movement, led here in the States by the University of Wisconsin’s Richard Davidson (who made Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world back in 2006), an expert in “contemplative neuroscience” who moved into the field after being asked by none other than the Dalai Lama why modern neuroscience didn’t study kindness and compassion. Ambo’s doc is a […]
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Daniel Schechter, Supporting Characters
A genuine meditation on male friendship, the absurdities of indie moviedom and many different kinds of loyalty, Daniel Schechter’s Supporting Characters, a surprise hit at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, sneaks up on you, its seeming limitations becoming its strengths over the course of its easy-going 87 minutes. Despite being shot in a fashion that recalls a comedy you might find on FX, Supporting Characters maintains an old-fashioned, craftsman-like quality about it; it’s written with feeling and humor that rings with truth, offering us characters whose lives are as complicated and full of ambiguity as our own. Alex Karpovsky and newcomer Tarik Lowe have […]
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Cinereach Announces 2012 Grant Recipients
Cinereach announced today that it has awarded over $500,000 in grants to 22 feature-length film projects that applied for support in 2012. More than 2,000 applications were submitted, from filmmakers based in upwards of 100 countries. The 22 grantees in this round are comprised of twelve non-fiction films, seven fiction films, and three hybrids. The fourteen new grantees range from the early development stages to late post-production. The renewed support went primarily towards the completion of prior grantees’ films, including Cutie and the Boxer, God Loves Uganda and Narco Cultura, which will premiere at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, and […]
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A 180 on 181
Nothing like a good fiscal crisis to get things moving in our federal government. After months of speculation and hand-wringing, the often misunderstood and underutilized Section 181 is back for producers, and it’s retroactive to 2012! Here are the specifics: The recently-enacted American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, which halted various tax increases scheduled to go into effect as part of the fiscal cliff, also retroactively extended the temporary rules for deducting certain film and television production expenses. The provision, Section 181 of the Internal Revenue Code, generally allows a deduction of up to $15,000,000 of the cost of a […]
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Romain Thomassin on Dailymotion’s Motionmaker Fund
With more than 106,000,000 unique monthly visitors and 2 billion views worldwide, Dailymotion is one of the leading video sharing sites in existence. They already offer 34 localized versions, in 16 different languages, and are steadfastly committed to providing an easy-to-use forum for high-quality and HD video to be shared online via their own users, independent content creators and premium partners. Dailymotion’s official squad of creators, known as “Motionmakers,” is free to join and grants access to benefits such as streaming in 1080p HD, 3D and live, participation in contests and festivals, priority positioning on the site and its search engine and […]
