Financing
Filmmaking - Financing
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Kickstart Frederick Wiseman’s In Jackson Heights
The great documentarian Frederick Wiseman has turned to Kickstarter to complete his latest sweeping portrait, this time of the titular Queens neighborhood, In Jackson Heights. Wiseman is currently whittling down 120 hours worth of rushes to complete the finished product, which is set for a fall festival debut and a 2016 PBS broadcast. Check out a teaser of the film above, and read a bit about Wiseman’s editing process below. My job as editor is to make the film as best I can from the rushes. What I think about the subject matter is what you see in the final film. At least […]
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“The Need to Crowdfund is a Major Curse, Indeed”: The Yes Men on the Changing Funding Landscape
Over at the Creative Capital blog, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno of the Yes Men have posted a sober essay about the changes they’ve seen in the documentary funding landscape since 2000, when they received one of the organization’s first grants for their feature, The Yes Men. Two films and 15 years later, the two are still at it — creatively agitating for social change while producing actions and making documentary films. Their latest film, The Yes Men are Revolting, directed with Laura Nix, opens June 12, and it mixes their trademark anarchic political humor with more ruminative passages reflecting on […]
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Popularity Mechanics: A Beginner’s Guide to Curmudgeonly Crowdfunding
Randy Mack is in the final three days of his Kickstarter for his New Orleans-set Laundry Day, and with roughly three grand to go, he lets loose with an acerbic howl against the indignities of crowdfunding that, he hopes, might make you think and, perhaps…. donate. People are the worst, and there’s nothing more humiliating than pandering to them. You became an artist to push back against sheeple’s sacred cows and conventional wisdom, and now technology has risen to empower… them. Not you. The Popular Ones. The last people on Earth who need empowering. Popular people, remember them? The ones […]
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Jennifer Phang, Nicole Beckwith and Stewart Thorndike Receive Inaugural SFFS Women Filmmaker Fellowships
The San Francisco Film Society announces today three women filmmakers as recipients of its SFFS Women Filmmaker Fellowships, a program supporting women making their second or third features in the genres of science fiction, comedy, action, thriller and horror — areas in which women are traditionally under-represented. Supported by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the fellowships are run by Filmmaker360, the Film Society’s filmmaker services department, and they include financial support, programs and events, mentorship services and more. “We’re thrilled to be kicking off this new initiative with such talented individuals, and to help bridge the support gap we have seen […]
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“Getting Funded is Only Part of the Story”: Kickstarter Embraces Timeline Film Pages with Spotlight
Kickstarter has rolled out today Spotlight, a very clever new design option for their project pages. On first glance it seems simple — sort of like Facebook’s Timeline, Spotlight turns your Kickstarter page into a reverse chronological story of your project’s inception, development, successful funding (you hope) and afterlife. By organizing your updates and milestones in the form of a clean narrative scroll, it encourages you to continue that story long after your campaign ends — making Kickstarter a stickier site. (More traffic for Kickstarter!) To make it worthwhile to filmmakers, as the video below shows, you’re given a prominently […]
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Fandor to Finance Original Shorts Program
Yesterday, Fandor announced the creation of its FIXshorts program, which invited participants in its FIX initiative to submit a budget and proposal for a short-form production. 5 out of the 34 proposals were selected to receive 50% project funding from Fandor, while the other half will be raised on Kickstarter, promoting a “hybrid process to help filmmakers use several modern fundraising and marketing tools to complete and distribute their projects.” Fandor will provide crowdfunding rewards (including monthly subscription trials) and assist with outreach, in addition to ensuring distribution on the streaming platform. The program will run twice annually, with more projects in consideration for support come […]
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Davey Foundation Offers Grants for Short Films; Deadline March 15
From filmmaker and Davey Foundation board member Dustin Guy Defa comes word of the upcoming deadline for the Davey Foundation, which will give three grants to filmmakers 35 years and younger for the production of short films. Ben Kegan’s The First Men won the Davey’s single grant last year. This year, two grants have been added, and the awards mix cash with in-kind services and mentorship. Full details below: The Davey Foundation was created to honor the life of David Ross Fetzer and his commitment to the film and theater arts. For 2015, the foundation is handing out three short […]
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“It’s Too Important to be Tucked Away for Another 30 Years”: Don Argott on Kickstarting Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time
Don Argott’s interests are eclectic, to say the least. Just in the past five years the Philly-based documentarian has followed the downward spiraling of rock stars, explored a nuclear-reactor community and, most recently, launched a Kickstarter campaign for his latest project Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time. The in-production doc is co-directed by Curb Your Enthusiasm co-creator Bob Weide and is about his decades-long attempt to make his own film about the iconic author, who in the process became a close friend. Argott spoke with Filmmaker about meeting Weide at an overseas film festival, going the indie financing route, and how […]
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“I Believe the Most Important Changes Will Come from Women Lifting Up Other Women”: Sarah Hack on Business and Legal Affairs
I’m with a small group of friends for our inaugural weekly movie night. Thinking that a club name will beget commitment, we arbitrarily choose “Zeitgeist.” It’s the first word we see, frozen on the makeshift projector screen. Zeitgeist Films is the distribution company for our opening film, the first in Laura Poitras’ post-9/11 trilogy and a 2007 Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary, My Country, My Country. For her film Citizenfour, Poitras is one of two female directors nominated for Best Documentary in the 2015 Oscar race. None have been nominated this year for Achievement in Directing. None have been […]
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Sundance Announces Groundbreaking Transparency Project at #ArtistServices Workshop
Data — it’s the most coveted property in independent film. While studios base their greenlight decisions on finely-honed models derived from the financial performance of numerous other pictures, many independent filmmakers perilously based investor pitches and distribution decisions on anecdotes and hearsay. What used to be simple extrapolation (“If that film grossed X, it probably did Y on home video”) has become a near impossible exercise in the age of digital distribution, in which paltry box-office returns hide “the real numbers” — a dizzying matrix of VOD stats, download figures, Netflix license fees and more and more obscure sub-categories of […]
