Category: Filmmaking

I have some experience with crowdfunding films. The first time I did it was with a PayPal button on this website to fund Modern Prometheus way back in 2009. The most recent effort was our successful crowdfunding of Time Signature this June (2014). I’ve done it 4 times. Three of those times were successful. One was not. I’ve used Kickstarter twice and Seed&Spark once. With this experience under my belt, I have this to say about crowdfunding: I hate it, but I’m still probably going to do it again some day.

Before I get too negative let me start with one of the things I love about crowdfunding: the audience. I love being able to tap into people who have enjoyed something I’ve done (there are a couple of people out there) and want to participate in the next project or who just think what I’m doing might be of interest to them. Hearing people say “this sounds like a cool project and I’m looking forward to seeing it” is a wonderful experience. I’ll admit I’m not really an audience-focused filmmaker. I make what I want to make and I just hope that I can get it out in front of some people who will enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed making it. When I find those people (or they find me) it’s really a wonderful experience. I love crowdfunding as an audience building tool. It makes me engage better with people who may enjoy my work, which is something I otherwise have difficulty with.

Now, let us get to the point and why for all the positive, warm, fuzzy feelings I can get from crowdfunding, I can’t stand it. Crowdfunding is a full-time job in order to allow you to pursue another full-time job (making the film). I know it has to be a full-time job, because I tried to balance a campaign with regular work when crowdfunding for Meme and that really did not work out. You have to have a plan and you have to be implementing that plan and working every angle you can every day of your campaign. This I can do. This I have done. This I am happy to do. But when you get weeks into the campaign and you still have a considerable distance to your goal you begin to question every single thing. Not just the work you’ve been doing on the campaign but your worth as a filmmaker. When not even at 40% of your goal at halfway to your deadline you start to wonder if every decision you’ve made in your life has been the worst thing ever.

Then you see someone raise nearly $40,000 for potato salad in less than a week (yes, it is real. No, I won’t link it.). Let’s talk about this. The work for crowdfunding is hard. It is time consuming and rough on the ego. I can do it, though. I get stressed. I get irritable. I can be unpleasant to know when I’m doing it. Regardless of how tough it gets I’m still beating my head against that wall to make my way to my goal. Then, someone posts a crowdfunding campaign for potato salad with a $10 goal and raises thousands of times that. He raises multiple times my own goal in just a handful of days. Then, everything seems pointless. Clearly people do not want my movie. They want some stranger to make potato salad.

Now, I’m not opposed to the guy raising money for potato salad. Good for him. I think it’s funny. What I am is irritated at the response that campaign received. There are legitimate projects on every crowdfunding platform where people are trying to raise necessary funds to create something less temporary than a potato salad. There are all sorts of projects but I will focus on film as I am a filmmaker. You might try and say that the people funding the potato salad wouldn’t be funding a film anyway and my response is: that’s the problem.

Many people online and offline like to say that they’re tired of the same old crap coming out of Hollywood year after year. Reboots, sequels, remakes, and adaptations dominate the market. I don’t particularly complain about this, because I know there is an alternative. Independent filmmakers are generating original ideas and creating original stories every single day and they are asking all of us to participate in that process every single day. They’re doing it through crowdfunding. They’re doing what I have done: working all day every day to scrape together just enough cash from a handful of interested people to barely pay to make their story a reality. The audience isn’t meeting them, though. The audience is funding potato salad.

In the end as much as people complain about the constant stream of just the same old crap from their entertainment sources, that’s really all they want. They will flock by the thousands to fund a project with a familiar name or face attached or just a joke about potato salad, but an original story that addresses that desire to see something new? Not a priority. They don’t really want that. They want potato salad. This is not to absolve the responsibility of myself or any other filmmaker in engaging the audience to get their interest. It is just to point out that one of the primary difficulties of crowdfunding is that we as filmmakers are in competition with the familiar and it is an uphill battle.

And this is what I hate about crowdfunding. I hate that it is both a great way to engage with my potential audience but that that potential audience is more interested in spending their money on something familiar or silly than on what they’ve been complaining that they want. Crowdfunding then becomes beholden to the same things restricting mainstream film funding (you can’t get it funded, if it is not already familiar) What’s the point of crowdfunding for the filmmaker and the independence it can offer to produce original works, when the only way to really make it work is to just do something that has been done over and over. I hate crowdfunding because of what the crowd is funding, and yet I’ll probably be back at it some day in the not too distant future, because I want to engage directly with that crowd again, because the ones that I find in the crowd who want to fund something different are wonderful and I love trying to fulfill that for them.

Since October 2013 I have directed 8 short films (as of the writing of this in July 2014). Two of those films remain incomplete. Time Signature is currently in post-production and Kitty Ostapowicz’s 600 Steps still has some scenes to shoot before we can enter post-production. That almost doubles my film output of the previous five years (not including films that went incomplete or unreleased). I made a conscious effort during the nine months from October 2013 through June 2014 to shoot more films.

Previously I would go months, and in some cases years, between projects. I would work on other projects but not as a director. After the unsuccessful conclusion of the Meme Kickstarter campaign I decided that I didn’t want to wait. I didn’t want there to be a big lull while I figured out what I was going to do with Meme next. I needed to shoot. I needed to shoot more than I had before. Not just for the sake of building out my resume or recovering from the ego blow of the unsuccessful campaign, but also because I needed to improve as a director.

They say that writers write as a way to nudge those who call themselves writers but never produce any written work to work on their craft. Well, it works for film too, I think. Directors direct. Directing is a skill and it is a skill that needs to be developed. It needs to be worked on. You can’t just do it because you’ve seen films and know theory and got a degree. You have to work on it. I hadn’t worked on it enough. So, I set out to work on it.

I started with small one (or sometimes two) day shoots using whatever I had on hand and whoever happened to be available to help out. Then, after writing Time Signature, I decided that I had a project that was going to need a lot more work, a lot more people, and money to make it work. Eight films in those nine months all designed to get me to practice my craft, to practice the skill set I claim to have. I could have made each one a big production and spent months on each but not all of them demanded it and I would probably have gotten one of them done and not really accomplished my goal of honing my directing skills.

I will be the first to admit that some of the films that I made over this period aren’t particularly good. Some are much too rushed. Still, they accomplished what I needed them too. They got me behind the camera and working on my skills and I think if one were to take Metatron (the first of these films I did in October of 2013) and compare it to Ione’s Date one can see an improvement. Certainly, I think that later this year when I release Time Signature you will see yet another improvement over Ione’s Date. 

Last week prolific filmmaker Joe Swanberg said something similar in a long but very informative, interview with Filmmaker Magazine. He discusses the value of making many smaller films. It’s not quite what I’ve been up to. He’s made a lot of features and I’ve focused on short films. His way of making films is different than my own. Still, I think we’re talking about something similar in that there is value pursuing quantity.

So, I want to advocate to my fellow filmmakers that you occasionally take the time to focus more on quantity than quality, because sometimes it’s not about making the best film but about making yourself the best filmmaker by pushing yourself to do more and do more of a variety of projects. The better a filmmaker you make yourself, the better your films will be.

I like weird movies. I like weird movies, because they challenge me and make me focus on them. Your standard action blockbuster, Oscar-bait drama, or sophomoric comedy we can all pretty much call the ending of when the opening credits roll. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s entertainment it should be comfortable. Sometimes I need a film to give me something more. Even if I have a good idea of where we’re going with the ending, it will distract me with stunning or unusual visuals or ideas. Here are some of my favorites (in no particular order):

1. El Topo - A western about philosophy and religion with some really bizarre visuals at times that I’m not sure I consciously comprehend but that definitely are working on me on some level.
2. Beyond the Black Rainbow - It’s like The Man Who Fell to Earth and 2001: A Space Odyssey made a slow-paced unsettling baby.
3. Videodrome - Always a personal favorite and probably the one film that has influenced my work more than any other.
4. Tommy – I really love musicals because I think that they encompass so much of the potential of film as a multi-disciplinary medium. I only just watched Tommy for the first time recently, but I think it will be among my favorites in the years to come because on top of being a musical it’s very very large and often non-literal. It’s not a “grounded” film. It is a spectacle in the most delightful way.
5. The Big Lebowski – Let’s put a stoner in a film noir.
6. The Lords of Salem – Another recent addition to my favorite weird movies. It’s a slow-burn, surreal horror film. No really big “scare” moments. Everything is just sort of eerie. It has a real 70s B-horror vibe to it and then veers off into something insane for the last five minutes.
7. Eraserhead – Of course, Eraserhead. The first time I watched it I couldn’t get more than a few minutes in. Now, I just get entranced by it.
8. Inland Empire – Okay, I’ve only watched it once, so far, but that sent me into a 12 hour writing binge during which I cranked out an … interesting … feature length script.
9. Antichrist - I don’t want to talk about it.
10. Enter the Void – The main character dies in the first act and then we float around from the perspective of his soul(?) for the rest seeing past, present, and future blended together in a visually stunning fashion.

What are your favorite weird films? What am I missing out on? Talk to me!