Well, here’s something nice to check out: Kickstarter‘s Best of 2012! Summing up the previous year they share some great results for those who believe in crowdsourcing! How about more than 2.2 million people funding more than a whopping 18,000 projects, raising almost 220 million dollars? Among them more than five thousand were music related, with various film and art reaching around one thousand projects. The list goes on and on.
Now, I personally believe that this and competitor (?) Indiegogo is the way to go for future independent projects. With the entertainment industry heavily relying on pretty conservative output they’re pretty much avoiding taking any chances whatsoever – no matter how great your music/script/book may be. But I was having a discussion with a friend earlier today, and with audience appeal being the vital key in order to generate the money needed, your project needs to be really out there if you’re not gonna manage to find and interest the roughly one thousand people on this planet needed to generate a decent amount of money. Dreaming of directing your 60 million dollar epic debut? Well, keep dreaming. But if you aim to pull it off at $60,000 the odds of you actually getting hold of that amount of money just exploded.
Remember my post about Hell Comes to Frogtown? Well, so far I haven’t met anyone who didn’t laugh when they heard the title and followed it with “Man, I gotta check that out!”, and unlike the (hellacious) ups and downs the filmmakers had to face back in the 80s while getting it financed, today they could’ve easily aquired the initial budget of $150,000 by presenting their idea on Kickstarter along with some script samples, conceptual art, maybe a presentation video and a faux trailer – with no producers meddling, interfering or in any other way trying to ruin their project. With crowdsourcing you’re instantly working with the supporters of your idea that unlike any major outlet pumping money into your project won’t hassle you about your creative vision! Plus, as an added bonus it eliminates any need of distribution whatsoever, as the product has in fact already been sold to its audience before Day 1. It’s honestly just a classic concept of eliminating the middle man.
Anyway, as they’re still only in their third year – and the average business usually needing about five before really break through – I’m pretty confident we’re still just seeing the tip of the iceberg on this phenomena. Two years from now I hope this form of funding is a major force to be reckoned with and with a bit of luck we even might see a (much needed) paradigm shift in popular culture. Anyway, check it out here, and while there maybe you should take some time to browse a couple of projects?
Now, even though I really hate to admit it I can on a strict economical level understand that if you aquire the rights for a movie that you want to make the most of it in order to maximise the profits from your deal. That’s Capitalism 101. But that used to mean heavy merchandising, saturating the rental market or just selling various editions of it on DVD – not remake the damn thing every second year. I mean c’mon, are you really that out of ideas? Did the pioneering spirit that gave Hollywood its name die out so all that’s left are coked-out accountants that go “I love lamp” while trying to wrap their heads around the latest Lynch script? Big-name producers apparently died off and a stampede of marketers followed, moving in with what I call a “McDonald’s attitude” (“hey, we heard you liked cheeseburgers so howsabout a billion of ‘em?“) killing off what little was left of the mainstream industry’s creativity, spirit and originality. Remember such 70s classics like The Exorcist, The Taking of Pelham 123, Get Carter, The French Connection? Not gonna happen anymore. Until the bottom falls out like it did towards the end of the 60s forcing the major studios to put on their thinking caps in order to save themselves.
Genre blog Rogue Cinema (that actually covers all things indy) just 
