No, I’m not talking about everyone’s
favorite F-bomb, I’m talking about a much more hideous word…. FAIL.
It’s a word that came to mean a lot to
me a couple of weeks ago at the conclusion of my fundraising campaign. I felt
like I'd failed.
Before the campaign launch I was working
with two producers who advised me that I needed $75,000 to make this movie. Then
that number changed to $150,000 for reasons I’m still not sure of.
This is a lot of money. And I
questioned whether I could raise it. But they told me to stop being so skeptical.
I had a little money already put aside,
but we still needed to raise a lot of money. So we set the fundraising goal at
$75,000.
After the first few days of the
campaign, we plateaued at around $3,000. I started to suspect that this was never gonna happen. I had entered this
fundraising campaign without a good team in place, and without any rich
friends.
Despite my best efforts; posting a
bunch of promo videos and updates, emailing everyone I know, even buying a
couple of facebook ads, I was way off my target. I made a total of $7936.00
The reaction from the two producers
after the money didn’t appear out of thin air? They shrugged and suggested I
enter the script into a screenplay competition. I went home from that meeting
and cried, feeling like failure. The dream was over.
After I dragged myself out of the black
hole I’d entered and upped my daily dose of Prozac, I realized wallowing was a
huge waste of time. I still had a movie to make.
I parted ways with those two producers and then I got to work breaking down the
script myself. Cutting locations, and minor characters – getting rid of
everything that wasn’t 100% necessary to tell the story. At its core, this film
is about human relationships. To tell that kind of story you don’t need bells
& whistles. You just need a good script and good actors.
As I started re-gaining momentum I
realized how ungrateful I was being about the money I had raised for my
campaign. I raised almost $8000! That’s fucking awesome. 76 incredibly generous
people donated their hard earned money into a movie that I want to make.
What’s even more amazing is how much
the cast and crew started rallying together and supporting me; offering up
their homes to use as locations, offering to bring snacks and cook food to have
on set, finding crew that will help free of charge, offering their cars to pick
up equipment. Even friends of mine who weren't already attached to the project started reaching out to offer help.
With the money that I already had
saved, plus the campaign money, I’m gonna make this movie. It will take some
more time and it will be a lot harder on such a tiny budget, but I’m
determined. And I’m now spurred on by the fact that I truly believe
storytelling doesn’t have to be insanely expensive. And that if we live in a world where
only people who are wealthy and privileged are allowed to tell stories, we will
all be missing out big time. Because although those people may be able to
afford to make a movie that looks
beautiful and slick – They often don’t have a whole lot to say.
This was the attitude that I started
out with when I set out to make this film. And somehow I got lost along the
way, letting money become more important than the movie itself. It took a
little failure to get my attitude back on track.
