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It is discouraging to watch worthy projects start up a crowd funding page and falter. Yet there are some that do it and win. That begs the question, what separates the successful from the also rans?
The Boston Film Industry Examiner will speculate a little on the question. That does not mean we have the correct answer, just an attempt.
Kickstarter and Indiegogo projects come and all to often go… nowhere. There are a few that have reached their funding goals. What they seem to have is a spirit of relentlessness.
The most recent triumph was the team that is putting together Ascendants. Now the concept, Immortality is possible, but only for an elite and the rest of humanity buys the farm, or actually becomes part of it, is attractive. The production team, an outgrowth of Charles River Media Group, is first rate. Money raising is another game.
They started with a facebook page, and then set up then kickstarter campaign. It looked to be a little slow at first. No matter, as time went by the Ascendants page seemed to have more and more posts and much of it was interacting with supporters which does not seem like a bad strategy.
The steady drumbeat of new facebook updates may not have been crucial, but who knows. Certainly, it didn’t hurt. Other crowd funding oft seem to go silent after launch.
Another campaign I followed was the successful kickstarter effort for Half Pint. Last spring, Duncan Putney wanted to fund “a short dramatic film to motivate our youngest generation to talk to, and learn history from, the World War II generation.” It is the story of a young boy, unstuck in time, who comes on some GIs in the middle of the Normandy Invasion. He too started a kickstarter campaign, and of course, is on facebook.
I wrote about it in this space as I thought it was a serious effort and I’m a history nerd. Like the Ascendants crew, Mr. Putney was unstinting in his efforts and he too was successful.
Moral of the story filmmakers; your effort must be persistent.
What’s the future? I would have thought Twitter would have come into play a bit more nowadays. The filmmaker Edward Burns uses it to keep up awareness of his movies and interact with his fan base.
Don Schechter and Team Ascendants twitted often and well about the project. It was surprising to find out, they don’t have that many followers on twitter. There is probably a chicken and egg aspect to it. Do you get a facebook account and then generate twitter followers or vice versa prior to, during or after kickstarter? Maybe there could be a synergy of using all three to keep people interested and thinking about a project.
The way social media goes there will be something else next season. Of course google+ seems to be going nowhere and I have no idea what Pinterest does.
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