Financing
Filmmaking - Financing
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Coogler, Tully, Guerrero, de la Vega and Cretton Among SFFS KRF Grant Winners
In recent weeks, we profiled in three posts on the site, the 13 finalists for the San Francisco Film Society’s Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking Grants. (In the current Fall issue of Filmmaker, we also spotlight the SFFS’s Filmmaker360 program, of which the KRF grants are the centerpiece.) Today, the winners of the KRF grants were announced, and five of the six were “25 New Faces” alums. Ryan Coogler, got postproduction funds for his forthcoming first feature, Fruitvale, which will debut at Sundance next month, while Michael Tully got money to finish his current film, Ping Pong Summer, which wrapped a […]
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The Happy Baby Theory of Kickstarter: You Need 800 Supporters
Last month we added Stephen Elliott’s Happy Baby to our curated Kickstarter page and ran here one of his daily Rumpus newsletters where he discussed the film and the goals for his campaign. Now, with hours left, he is tantalizingly within reach of his ambitious $85,000 goal. (You can put him over the top here and score an imaginative reward in the process.) As his campaign nears its close, I thought I’d run with permission today’s newsletter, in which he discusses what will hopefully be his successful “800 backers” strategy. — SM We’re almost at our Kickstarter goal for the […]
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Making a Film? Read the Credits First
At a recent filmmaking panel hosted by the Massachusetts Production Coalition, filmmaker Chico Colvard offered the following advice to those getting started in moviemaking: read the credits first. The credits of other movies. “I’m fascinated by end credits,” said Colvard. “They’re so revealing. They’re fascinating in that filmmakers use them to continue the story….there’s so much more information there.” The credits can provide you with not just a list of potential cast and crew members. They can also give you the names of accountants and lawyers. More importantly, they can give you the names of possible investors. Other filmmakers might […]
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The Yes Men Are Revolting… and Crowdfunding
We’re making a new movie called The Yes Men Are Revolting – and we’re crowdfunding it on Kickstarter. We hit our initial goal of $100,000, but now we’re trying to double that. Why the new goal? Because we’re enacting a super-ambitious transmedia distribution plan that will take advantage of everything we learned so far about filmmaking and making a difference. Releasing our last movie on a shoestring budget was such a monumental task that we swore we would never do it again. But now is never. We endured the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in New York, and now we have […]
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Shake-ups in Online Video
Online video’s come a long way in the seven-and-a-half years since the launch of YouTube, but it’s no secret that the landscape’s still constantly changing for filmmakers, both independents and studios. The big question, still, is how to best monetize online viewing, as a few recent developments have illustrated. Karin Chien has a great piece in the current issue of Filmmaker (available for subscribers here) about how some YouTube stars have built up massive audiences that have, in turn, supported them financially and empowered them to deal with Hollywood on favorable terms. But we all know that going viral can […]
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Hearing Central Pitches at the IDFA Forum
So, I am in Amsterdam, attending my first IDFA, a fest I’ve been dreaming of attending since I first started working in documentary. IFP has 11 films in the fest, and four works in progress in the Forum, so I’m here for moral support, promotion of IFP, and reconnaissance. What is happening in documentary in the rest of the world? In advance of my arrival, I was most anticipating being a part of the Forum, “IDFA’s international co-financing and production market, Europe’s most important breeding ground for new documentary work.” The Forum presents works in progress to the international funding […]
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A (Screening) Room of One’s Own: U.S. in Progress, Part Two
The central metaphor of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, as I remember it, is the university; she talks about the vast number of people who participate in its creation – from those who fund & design it to those who actually build it – the result of which is a single (male) student being able to sit and write. Woolf’s point is to illuminate the gendered nature of the systems and structures on which scholarship is built, but the scale of resources that go into the screening of any one film – especially one overseas, in the context […]
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Buy a Relationship with James Franco for $6,000
A couple of weeks ago we selected Stephen Elliott’s Happy Baby for our curated Kickstarter page, and since then he’s been adding a number of provocative awards to the campaign. The most interesting was added today: for $6,000, Elliott will transfer to you his relationship with the actor and director James Franco, who starred in his feature About Cherry and owns the rights to his novel The Adderall Diaries. Muses Elliott, “What does that mean?” “I’m not really sure,” he continues. “I can’t promise anything from James, but I’ll send you a notarized document transferring full ownership.” Memorializing and transferring […]
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Growing Up in an American Commune
The following is a guest blog post from the makers of American Commune, which is currently in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign to cover post-production costs. — SM When my sister and I started making our documentary about growing up on America’s largest commune, we honestly didn’t intend for it to be a personal story. At the time, we were both working as directors at MTV in New York City and none of our friends or colleagues had the slightest clue we were born on a commune called The Farm. We had left as kids in the 1980s when […]
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Susan Youssef, Habibi
Nearly 10 years in the making, Habibi is the semi-autobiographical first feature from 2010 “25 New Face” Susan Youssef, a tale of forbidden love between two Palestinian students who find it impossible for their affection to overcome the rigid conventions of class in Palestinian life and Israel’s ironclad security regime. With Israelis and Palestinians again in actively violent conflict, the film couldn’t be more newsworthy, but Youssef’s low-budget aesthetic ingenuity (she couldn’t shoot in Gaza, but faked it admirably) and a remarkable performance from Maisa Abd Elhadi, as the young woman at the center of multiple circles of conflict (family […]
