For Would-Be Sundancers, Kickstarter Can Fuel Films
If you want to make a movie, you generally need a lot of money. And filmmakers have to be creative about raising it.
Just ask the filmmakers at the Sundance Film Festival, taking place this week in Park City, Utah. Some 10 percent of the films selected for this year's iteration of the prestigious festival raised money through the crowd-funding website Kickstarter.
In the three years since the website launched, Kickstarter-funded films have been nominated for Oscars, picked up by Showtime and HBO, and honored with awards at Sundance, South By Southwest and Cannes.
Kickstarter is used by artists in every discipline, but film is its biggest category. And, as one Kickstarter employee put it, "filmmakers are natural hustlers."
Just check out the videos they make to get you to give them money. There's the you-get-stuff pitch. There's the humorous, feel-sorry-for-us pitch. There's even a pitch from people who you'd think already have the money, like Whoopi Goldberg.
And those campaigns are successful. Goldberg raised over $73,000 for a documentary about the comedian Moms Mabley. Another Kickstarter-funded documentary, Detropia, was recently short-listed for an Oscar.
According to Kickstarter, more than $100 million has been pledged to films on the site.
"We quickly began to realize that this was something really capturing people's attention and excitement, and allowing people to connect with creative endeavors — [something] that was sort of transformational," says Keri Putnam, executive director of the Sundance Institute.
When Sundance supports a film, it's highlighted on a special page on Kickstarter. "They can make more money through Kickstarter than they can through a Sundance grant," Putnam says.
'Anomalisa' Kickstarter Pitch