Bunny Blog

Since Super Tuesday, the election coverage has been focusing a lot on Obama’s small-donor, grassroots support – a nice little story of how smaller donors have together financed the largest campaign fundraiser in history.  This has been possible largely through collective action online (organized through MoveOn.org and the like) and by simple direct response.  It’s easy for almost anyone to take a few minutes and Paypal $20, $50, whatever… and that is driving this kind of change.

So I started thinking, why doesn’t something like this exist for film financing?  It turns out, it does!

There are already a handful of sites for web-based film financing: IndieGoGo, FilmRiot, and IndieMaverick.  These sites all basically function to partner up filmmakers with fans and financiers (generally on micro-budget projects of $50,000 or less).  Essentially, you “pitch” your project to the site’s users, who can then rate and contribute to your fundraising goals as they see fit.  Contributions range from $5 to thousands, and goals similarly differ from a few thousand up to millions.   So, viewers and investors get to see a wide variety of projects, and choose to endorse and finance those that they would want to see!  Filmmakers, in turn, get their films made.  Sounds great, right?

Well, sorta.  A few minutes noodling around IndieGoGo already reveal some serious questions.  Out of nearly 100 films that were submitted, only 7 had any sort of funding commitment whatsoever.  And only 3 of those had managed to raise more than $100.  On IndieMaverick, films were raking in a few more dollars, but only 2 had reached even 1% of their funding goals!  So what’s wrong with this picture?

It could be a lot of things.  Perhaps these sites simply aren’t mature enough: not enough users to match to material they like, and therefore no money.  The quality of the material, as well, seemed a bit lacking on most of the submissions.  And I’m guessing that people have some real questions about what sort of return on investment they’ll be seeing if they go in on these projects, and those questions aren’t being answered.  Film financing is pretty murky for what essentially amounts to a “hobbyist” activity like we see here, and most investors would like to get something tangible out of their help, even if that something is just a steadfast guarantee that the film will even actually be made with the money!

Still, I see a lot of promise here.  As someone who personally has a film stalled in mid-production due to lack of funds, “open-source” initiatives like this make me smile.  I suspect that we’re seeing a glut of “first-to-market” sites that will eventually give way to better-organized, clearer, more productive next-generation sites that can actually deliver an audience of financiers.  And then there are slightly different perspectives like Kinooga, which is essentially pre-selling tickets to movies that have yet to be made, with much clearer commitments being made on both sides.  And, of course, there are more and more alternative methods of distribution, like last year’s Four Eyed Monsters, which partially recovered its $100,000 financing on a $1 per-referral subscription partnership with Spout.com, based upon  full-length views at YouTube.

In other words, it’s a while still before election day, but the people are starting to speak.