Last night we launched a special collection of new rewards for Stop/Eject sponsors. Available only until midnight next Friday, these rewards are already going fast, so grab yours quickly before they’re all gone. At the time of writing, a screen-used poster, one personalised cassette and four t-shirts are still available.
The Tape Collection
In the top right is the genuine poster seen behind Georgina Sherrington (Kate) and Oliver Park (Dan) in the living room scenes of Stop/Eject, signed on the back by yours truly. At bottom left is a unique opportunity to have one of the screen-used cassettes from the film relabelled and beautifully calligraphed by Sophie Black with a date and 90 minute time segment of your choice (though please note the tape is actually only sixty minutes long). There’s only one poster and one personalised tape available, so don’t miss your opportunity to scoop them up.
Bottom right is a Stop/Eject t-shirt featuring Alain Bossuyt’s competition-winning poster design. These are printed to order in your size, and we only have four more available at the time of writing. Thanks to Sam Tansley for modelling this.
There was a glorious 48 hours about ten days ago when everything was going our way on Stop/Eject. We had all our key cast and crew, all our locations, most of our props and costumes and we seemed well on the way to getting everything we didn’t have in time for the shoot.
Then people started dropping out. First the lead actress, then a sound recordist, then the lead actor. This, unfortunately, is the way it goes when you can’t pay people. You can’t expect them to put the film first. No amount of advance planning can change that.
Alas, poor Daniel
So on Tuesday I’m off to London (nine hours round trip on National Express – the closest you can get to hell on earth) to audition a new cast. Exciting, but scary because of the limited time remaining before we shoot.
And on Wednesday it’s up to Birmingham for the final fundraising lecture – 8:30pm at Ort Cafe, 500-506 Moseley Road, B12 9AH. Find out how my feature film Soul Searcher was financed, made and distributed, with plenty of clips, behind-the-scenes footage and amusing anecdotes. As usual entry is free, but donations will be welcomed.
And by the time that’s all over there will be little more than a week before we shoot.
Despite the setbacks I’m feeling pretty positive about the whole thing. Almost every aspect of the production has been improved by the postponement from last autumn – including the props, some of which you can see here. Roll on April 21st!
There’s been quite a bit of interest in the lighting sandbags Katie made in the last Stop/Eject podcast. Some people who have not mastered the art of sewing have nonetheless expressed an interest in getting their hands on such a sandbag.
Simultaneously, I find myself with a number of unclaimed DVD copies of The Dark Side of the Earth: Making the Pilot sitting on my shelf. (That’s another thing I’ve learnt about crowd-funding which I forgot to put in my evaluation blogs: lots of sponsors don’t claim their rewards.)
So I thought, why not offer these two lovely items to the general public? Note: the following offer is no longer available.
Donate £10 and choose one of these free gifts
For a limited time only, donate £10 to Stop/Eject using the Paypal button below or in the righthand sidebar and you’ll receive either a sandbag or a Making the Pilot DVD – your choice. (Note: these items will ONLY be sent to a mainland UK address.) You’ll also get the usual rewards: a thank you in the credits, an invite to the premiere, and a download of my unprecedented indie budget exposé, How to Make a Fantasy Action Movie for £28,000. All for just ten squid!
The sandbags are saddle style, consisting of two zipped pouches, each capable of holding around half a stone (3.18kg) of sand (not included), and a sturdy handle. They’re handmade, upcycled and eco-friendly. Zip and handle colours may vary.
Making the Pilot
Making the Pilot is a 23 minute documentary going behind the scenes of the demo sequence I shot for The Dark Side of the Earth in 2008 with Benedict Cumberbatch and Kate Burdette. All aspects of the production are covered, from building the puppet, costumes and set, through casting, swordfight choreography and 35mm cinematography to miniature effects and digital rotoscoping. Bonus features include a guided tour of the art department workshop, nine video blogs from the Cannes Film Festival, several videomatics providing low-tech glimpses of some of The Dark Side of the Earth’s biggest sequences, and extensive galleries of storyboards and concept art. This will probably be your last opportunity to get your hands on this rare DVD. Only a few copies remain and when they’re gone they’re gone.
Note: the offers outlined this post are no longer available.
This blog is intended to be an honest and (as far as reasonably possible) transparent record of the high and lows of filmmaking. This entry is unfortunately about a low.
Sometimes stuff doesn’t work out, despite your best efforts. This photo shows how many people turned up for Tuesday night’s Soul Searcher lecture in aid of Stop/Eject:
Hereford lecture
Yep, none.
Empty
Was it not promoted well enough? Did the fact that it was free make people think it would be rubbish? Are there just not enough filmmakers in Hereford? Was Pancake Day a bad choice of date? Did everyone stay home to watch the Brit Awards? Who knows?
Whatever the reason, the donations bucket remained empty.
Okay, technically a couple of people did turn up. Nathan, the Rural Media employee who was responsible for the projector and other equipment, and my friend Johnny from The Picnic. So we went back to our flat for coffee and a chat about Soul Searcher.
The Derby lecture, as part of Five Lamps’ Film Night on March 27th, is still going ahead, and should have no trouble attracting an audience as Five Lamps is well established.
But it’s back to the drawing board for fundraising ideas to close the gap of a few hundred pounds that will remain before we can shoot.
Benedict Cumberbatch as Max (photos by Richard Unger)
As regular readers will know, Sophie Black and I have raised over £2,000 for Stop/Eject through crowd-funding, and we’re doing some filmmaking lectures soon which will serve as fundraising events to increase that budget. (Don’t forget the Hereford one is next week, Tuesday, 7pm at The Rural Media Company.) The third and final piece of the fundraising puzzle is the sale of the “germ suit” worn by Benedict Cumberbatch in the pilot for my in-development fantasy film, The Dark Side of the Earth.
Benedict was playing Maximillian Clarke, a paranoid hypochondriac who’s so afraid of germs that he lives inside a sealed suit that filters all the bacteria out of his air and food. Isabelle Vincey, the heroine, finds him surviving in an igloo on the Dark Side of the Earth and he joins her on her quest to start the world turning again.
The suit was built by FBFX, whose credits include armour and special costumes for such films as Troy, Gladiator, The Phantom Menace and Event Horizon. Here’s the podcast about them building and testing it:
Getting into the suit
Benedict was a real trooper on the shoot. He was trailing cables and pipes, carrying all the weight of the suit, blinded by the fogging visor and deafened by the compressor that kept the suit inflated. Every time Katie took his helmet off he was sweating buckets. But he never complained. (By contrast, after he’d left – to go to the BBC for the first read-through of Sherlock – we put crew member AJ Nicol in the suit for five minutes for a wide shot and he came out swearing and cursing and moaning.) Here’s the podcast about shooting with the suit, featuring an interview with Benedict:
Suited and booted
Since that shoot, in December 2008, the suit has been in a box in my loft. I always hoped one day I would live somewhere with enough space to display it on a mannequin, but there wasn’t much chance of that in the foreseeable future, so this year I figured it was time to trade it in for some filmmaking cash. If The Dark Side of the Earth ever gets off the ground, we can always build another one – an even better one.
Originally I planned to sell the suit on eBay, promoting the auction to Benedict fan sites and the like, but then Sophie put me in touch with David Bidwell, owner of The Monster Company. This Nottingham-based company sells movie props and memorabilia.
David was excited when I told him about the suit and Dark Side in general, and this morning he paid me a visit to check out the suit and watch the pilot. He loved the pilot so much he asked to watch it a second time. He went away with the suit tucked under his arm (alright, draped over his arm and with me following carrying a couple of boxes with the rest of it in) and the Stop/Eject budget looking a little healthier.
As previously mentioned, more money needs to be raised ahead of Stop/Eject‘s shoot – which we hope will be in April or May. I can now reveal one of the ways in which we plan to close this funding gap.
Ray Bullock Jnr. as Joe in Soul Searcher
In 2005 I completed Soul Searcher, described by The Guardian as “a fantasy action movie in the grand style”. With six weeks of night shooting, martial arts fights, 280 FX shots and a climactic chase between a 1973 Ford Mustang and an express train to Hell, Soul Searcher was a tough project to say the least, and I learnt loads from it. It was also my first film to be properly distributed, getting an international DVD release.
So over the next couple of months I’ll be delivering an in-depth lecture about how I financed, shot, post-produced and sold Soul Searcher in various venues around England. There will be lots of clips and behind-the-scenes footage and a Q&A session at the end. These lectures will be FREE to attend, but we will encourage satisfied attendees to contribute a little cash to Stop/Eject at the end.
So far we have the following venues confirmed:
Hereford, February 21st, 7pm at The Rural Media Company, Sullivan House, 72-80 Widemarsh Street, HR4 9HG
Derby, March 27th, as part of the Five Lamps Film Night at The Quad – details TBC
Details of further venues to follow as they are arranged.
The other big news for Soul Searcher is that, since its distribution contract expires this week, I’ll soon be releasing the film on YouTube. That’s right – it will be FREE to view in full. And there is more news to come regarding the extensive behind-the-scenes material, but I’ll save that for another day.
I’ll leave you with something I came across yesterday while looking through my old hard drive in preparation for this online release: a cheesy music video that was intended to be a DVD extra, but which never made it onto the disc due to lack of space. Enjoy…
Yesterday I was interviewed by RKD Films for their feature documentary, working title: “The British Film Industry”. They had found me through the Midlands Today report and initially wanted to talk to me about crowd-funding, but after visiting my websites decided to focus more on my career history and the support I’ve received from public funding bodies…. or not.
RKD have already shot 30 interviews with a variety of people from indie filmmakers to Ben Kingsley, and they have plenty more planned. Their aim is to build up a picture of filmmaking in Britain today, with particular emphasis on what the government is and isn’t doing to support the industry. It should prove very interesting viewing.
Note that most if not all of these sites charge sponsors a Paypal/Amazon fee on top of their donations.
Crowdfunding sites fall into two categories: “all or nothing” and “keep it all”. “All or nothing” sites return the money to the sponsors if you don’t reach your target by the deadline.
So why did Sophie and I choose this kind of site? A good question, and one several sponsors asked me during the campaign. Two reasons:
It would have been impossible to make the film for less than £2,000. Even as it is we have to raise further money.
A ticking clock motivates sponsors, particularly towards the end of a campaign. Undoubtedly many of the people who donated at the eleventh hour did so because they didn’t want to see us fail and get none of the money. If we would have got the money regardless, I’m sure some of those people wouldn’t have bothered contributing.
DVD copies of Soul Searcher were amongst the rewards.
And why did we choose Crowdfunder over the other “all or nothing” sites? Mainly because Sophie’s successful Jar of Angels campaign had run on there. Also we were keen to use a site that works in sterling, because we knew most of our sponsors would be British and we thought some of them might be put off by a foreign currency.
It was only when the campaign was running that I realised Crowdfunder could be a little more streamlined. Two or three people contacted me to say they wanted to donate but couldn’t figure out how to do it. There’s no “fund now” button unless you’ve set up an account and logged in – and having to set up an account in itself puts some people off, although Crowdfunder has one of the quickest account set-up procedures I’ve ever seen on a website.
I’ve sent this feedback to Crowdfunder and hopefully they will be able to act on it in the future.
A signed print of this artwork by Sophie Black was one of the rewards.
Finally a word about the rewards. We wanted to be able to send out the rewards pretty quickly after the campaign finished, so we didn’t offer anything tied to Stop/Eject itself except a thank you in the credits and a print of Sophie’s living room artwork. Instead we offered downloads and DVDs of my previous films, signed posters, and even 35mm frames from The Dark Side of the Earth‘s pilot.
Coming up with original and enticing rewards is very difficult. I’m not sure the ones we came up with were anything special, but fortunately people don’t tend to donate for the rewards. Most people just want to be part of something and help out, in which case rewards that involve them in the film – visit the set, be an extra, DVD copy, premiere invite, etc. – are probably the best way to go. I think that’s what I’ll offer next time.
I hope you’ve found these evaluation blogs interesting. Let me know how you get on with your own campaigns. Meanwhile, I’ll be back soon with news of the other fund-raising efforts which will soon kick in for Stop/Eject.
Like I said in part one, when you’re running a crowd-funding campaign you wake up every morning wracking your brains for some new way of encouraging donations today. In this post I’m going to look at all the things we did to promote the campaign.
Here are the top three things that led to donations, as far as I can tell:
And here’s everything else we did. I can’t positively say that many of these things led directly to donations, but if nothing else I’m sure they contributed to general awareness which is also important for any campaign.
I found some websites and Facebook groups for audio cassette enthusiasts and some others for fans of time travel fiction, but my attempts to infiltrate them weren’t successful.
Places we asked to mention the campaign or spread the word, but we couldn’t get them to answer our messages:
Several popular indie filmmakers’ websites
Certain regional screen agencies who shall remain nameless
Local radio
I was particularly disappointed that none of the filmmakers were able to give even a brief mention to the project, especially as I sent them free invites to “How to Make a Fantasy Action Movie…” – the idea being that they would watch it, see what a unique and valuable resource it is for indie filmmakers and encourage their readers to donate in order to see it too. I’m sure these people get far more requests to promote crowd-funding campaigns than they could ever grant, but I felt sure that “How to Make…” would give us the edge.
To end this post on a more positive note, I must mention the brilliant Mike Rhodes who seemed to work like a demon promoting the campaign on Twitter, Facebook and anywhere else he could. Cheers, Mike!
In the final part of this evaluation I’ll be looking at the rewards we offered and the crowd-funding platform we chose. That should probably have been the first part. Whoops.
Shortly after Stop/Eject‘s crowd-funding campaign launched, I listened to a podcast in which one of the founders of Indiegogo was interviewed. She said many filmmakers target other filmmakers for donations, which is stupid because most filmmakers are broke and will spend any spare cash they do have on their own projects. She reckoned people should target the ordinary man in the street who has never heard of crowd-funding and is excited by the idea of being involved with a film.
That makes a lot of sense but it’s not quite how things worked out on Stop/Eject. So let’s have a look at what type of people did donate.
Breaking down the type of people who sponsored Stop/Eject
(Sorry about all the graphs, by the way. I know this site’s starting to look like a maths textbook.)
These charts tell me a few things:
Filmmakers are keen to help other filmmakers, but are too broke to contribute more than small amounts.
Doing corporate work has many benefits for filmmakers.
I don’t have enough social media “friends”.
Pie charts are fun.
Okay, I knew all those things already. I think the most interesting point to take away here is that three quarters of the money came from people who already knew me to some degree.
Conclusion: crowd-funding is not so different from any other type of financing.
The Dark Side of the Earth has been repeatedly turned down for financing because it’s not based on an existing book, graphic novel, game, theme park ride, Broadway musical, freak alignment of belly button fluff, etc. Producers didn’t want to take the risk on something without a pre-existing audience.
Similarly, people are generally not inclined to contribute to a crowd-funding campaign unless they have an existing interest in some aspect of the film – i.e. they know the filmmaker, or there is an actor they’ve heard of in it, or it’s shooting in their town, or whatever. You need elements!
I sponsored this Movember tash in return for a Stop/Eject contribution.
So, does how much you can raise from crowd-funding really just come down to how many people you know? No, it can transcend this. The Underwater Realm recently raised more than $100,000 from over a thousand sponsors. They managed this because their project is incredibly inspiring and ambitious. Nothing like it has been done before. Presumably they also tweeted about it until their fingers bled.
Stop/Eject is a much more modest project which was never intended to be crowd-funded. If I were writing a script from scratch to be financed this way, I would make it much…. well, “flashier” is the best word I can come up with.
Finally it’s worth mentioning that some people will have their own unique reasons for sponsoring your project. Several people offered me sponsorship in return for something: donating to a charity, promoting their business, promoting their own crowd-funding campaign. I was happy to do these things where I could.
Next time I’ll discuss the things we did to publicise the campaign and encourage people to contribute.
