Wanted $7,476.00
Got $1,510.00
- Overall expectations going into the "Yes/Pursue" decision
The folks on the decision committee had pretty high expectations about this, if anything because I'm a female F/X artist (rare creature) raising funds for my directorial debut with a horror movie (supposibly rare creature). The fact that I am doing a complete werewolf transformation using entirely practical F/X was supposed to really rope in the genre fans since we really don't see that much anymore with the development of CGI.
I'll be honest, I thought it just might be enough to get people interested in the project too.
- Pre planning
Thought about what people would need to see to understand how serious we were. Since we were looking to top off our minimum budget before going into production, we didn't have a cast or teaser footage. All we had was a script, an ambitious core crew, a few locations, and a couple prototypes I'd built for some of transformation F/X. And although I hate being in front of the camera, I agreed to do the campaign pitch video.
We read everything we could find about tips to have a successful campaign. We had a team of ten people on the campaign (and a bunch of crew members who came onboard later and weren't added to the official campaign team). Our co-producer wrote up a press release while we compiled a list of about 150 horror-related websites, blogs, magazines, and podcasts to send it to as soon as the campaign launched. We further compiled a list of at least 600 email addresses of horror genre fans.
We also set up accounts for the film on Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and YouTube.
To keep updates going, we started by introducing a new crew member every week with an essay I called "Meet the Crew Mondays". We also periodically spotlighted any cast who came onboard early.
Trying to combat the "things go slow mid-campaign", we filmed what we called a "Blood Drive" to try to keep people donating. The idea was that everytime a milestone was reached, we'd kill a different horror movie critter. A zombie at $1500, a backwoods cannibal at $3000, etc.... We would launch the Blood Drive on Dec. 1, which was our halfway mark, then send out a second press release about that.
And finally, we thought it'd be cute to launch the campaign on the night of a full moon, so it went live on October 28th.
- What you received advice and were warned about before or during the campaign
Asides from the above-mentioned slow-down in the middle, we were finding all kinds of advice about how it needs to be a full-time job promoting. Since there were initially 10 of us (and later a lot more), we thought we had that covered. (I myself have spent an average of 10 hours a day working promotion leads.)
We went against the advice of running a 30-day campaign and opted for a 60+ day because we felt we could keep up the pace and knew that some of our promotional venues would need at least a month to get into print.
- What you were trying to (and not to) convey in the campaign?
That we are seriously independent. That we have the talent but not the money or name-recognition. That we are attempting to do something very ambitious.
We didn't want anyone to get the impression that we would just give up if we didn't make our goal. We knew it was a risk to opt for flexible funding on indiegogo, but we also knew we'd go into production no matter how much we raised. We just expected it would be put back a few months if we fell very short on our goal.
- Nuances in the donor premium/reward structure
We knew that we couldn't offer downloads or quick copies of the movie because that would prevent us from entering festivals that required an exclusive premiere. So we decided that we'd have some of our crew put together on-set interviews and BTS footage for a "behind the scenes" video that we could give to our donors as a perk. The copies of the film we offered at a higher level we stressed would be delivered upon the film's release.
We wanted our perks to be related to the film, and we also knew that some of our ideas would take a lot of time and money to produce (like making a wall plaque cast from the FX sculpture of the creature). So our high-dollar perks were really unusual items, as well as the common associate producer credit /screening copy offer, and our lower end perks were things that we knew we could produce and deliver relatively quickly.
Our creature designer surprised us halfway through the campaign by giving us three original art pieces that were inspired by the campaign for the film. We added those to the perks as well.
All our donors would get public recognition on our social media venues, or what we called "Howl Outs".
- Financial and attitude observations of family, immediate friends, long distance extended e-friends, strangers
People who don't know the biz: "Wow! That's a lot of money you need!"
People who know the biz: "That's not nearly enough. You need to ask for more."
- Donation expectations and observations
This probably really sounds stupid, but I had expected a better showing from the people who yell from mountaintops about supporting indie films. I keep forgetting that showing support means hitting the "like" button on Facebook.
At least one person on my team expressed dissappointment that they didn't get much (if any) support from family.
I know some team members were surprsied that we didn't get more financial support from women.
- What did people seem to "miss"?
I'm beginning to believe that many people just assumed that we couldn't do everything we said we are going to. I don't have any creature transformations on my demo reel because quite frankly I've never done one before. I couldn't figure out a polite way to tell people that is only because every producer/director I've talked to about doing a werewolf film (except for those who are part of my team) wouldn't touch a transformation with a ten-foot pole because they are notriously expensive and take a long time to shoot. Obviously I'm not paying myself to do it and I have a full week scheduled to film it, so that's why I can be confident about doing it well for little money.
I also think that people are accustomed to Kickstarter's all-or-nothing approach and didn't understand that on indiegogo we'd get our donations even if we didn't meet our goal. If people saw we were so far under, they might not have bothered to kick in because they felt we wouldn't make it anyway.
- Surprises, good and bad
The Good:
Biggest surprise being the support we recieved outside of the campaign. Our plan was that if we didn't meet our goal that we would take a half-year to try to raise the money needed in other ways and then go into production in the Fall. But once the campaign started getting promoted, people came out of the woodwork offering us their services and donating equipment that really slashed our budget needs down significantly. We also had a couple private donations come in outside of indiegogo that put us at 75% of our monetary needs.
The Bad:
We can't for the life of us figure out how indiegogo figures its "gogo-factor". We never got closer to the front than page 17 throughout the whole campaign even on weeks when we had hundreds of people visiting the page and were posting frequent updates. (At one point we were joking about maybe it is because we don't have a "good cause" and should consider re-writing our script so that our werewolves are single lesbian mothers who need heart transplants.)
The Ugly:
We found out the hard way that paying to promote Facebook posts is a crapshoot. We'd gotten excited about seeing our "people who saw this" go from 50-70 on a post to into the thousands... until we discovered that most of those people were in places very far away from our demographic and were not actually people clicking on the promoted post (presumably because the campaign videos are in English.)
- Next time what would you repeat and what would you do differently?
The same: Pretty much everything, except leave out the Blood Drive..
Differently: Get more of a buzz going about the film
before launching a campaign and make the pitch more exciting and less technical. Not be in the pitch video myself because I simply do not emote well, nor to I speak loudly. (My sound mixer hates me!)
- Would you try crowdfunding again?
We're thinking about giving it another go in the spring once we have our cast and musicians onboard. The idea being fresh blood and further reach. (We didn't do that this time around because I wouldn't start casting if I didn't know exactly when we'd be going into production.) If we do, it will just be to raise money to add production value since we're shooting some of our bigger scenes later in the year.
- Alternatives
The thought did cross our minds to dress up as werewolves and knock over some convenience stores.
Really, I have no idea. The indiegogo was our alternative after failing to find investors.
