Today we’re sharing the Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for No Sleep Till, the feature debut from French-American filmmaker Alexandra Simpson. So far, $3,735 has been raised by 21 backers toward a flexible $25,000 goal, with 29 days remaining to secure funds through the campaign. Producing the film is Ham on Rye and Happer’s Comet director Tyler Taormina, a member of the filmmaking collective Omnes Films, which appeared on our 25 New Faces of Film list in 2021. Also on board in Zurich-based producer Michael Graf, who produced the Sundance ’23 short White Ant. Here’s a general synopsis and pitch of No […]

In early 2015, Kino Lorber mounted a successful crowd-funding campaign for Pioneers of African-American Cinema. The campaign raised over $53,000, far surpassing its original $35,000 goal. Now Kino Lorber is hoping to repeat that success with its new Kickstarter campaign for their upcoming release Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers. So far, they’ve raised more than $20,000 towards the $44,000 goal. “You wouldn’t know it looking back at the last 90 years of film history, but at one time, it was not uncommon to have women behind the camera in Hollywood,” says writer-director Ileana Douglas in the campaign video (above). Presented in association with the […]

Vidiots, the iconic Santa Monica movie rental store-turned film non-profit, has launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo with the goal of raising $65,000 to keep the doors open and to fund new programs. Just last year, Vidiots was in danger of closing after 30 years in business. Not long after co-owners Cathy Tauber and Patty Polinger announced they were going to have to shutter, they got a last-minute donation from film producer Megan Ellison of Annapurna Pictures. But Vidiots needs to continue raising money in order to launch new programs and initiatives to preserve and provide access to their diverse and […]

In part I of this interview, cinematographer Eve M. Cohen talked about working on the independent feature Be Somebody. In the second part of the interview, she talks about her experience with shooting for virtual reality projects, as well as Seed and Spark, a crowd funding and community site for filmmakers. Filmmaker: You’ve started working in virtual reality. Can you tell us about that? Cohen: Virtual reality is really exciting and I think that it’s important to differentiate virtual reality filmmaking from 2D or linear filmmaking. Virtual reality is a completely new medium and it takes place completely surrounding you, […]

A new partnership between Alamo Drafthouse, the independent theater chain and distribution company, and Legion M, the world’s first fan-owned entertainment company, could help pave a new way for independent films to get financed and developed. The two companies announced yesterday that they had formed a strategic partnership to develop and distribute genre content, including feature films, shorts and virtual reality. On May 16th, Legion M launched a public equity crowdfunding campaign under new rules adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission under the the 2012 JOBS Act. Since it launched the campaign last week, the company has raised $400,000 from accredited investors and […]

My name is Nijla Mu’min and I’m an award-winning writer/filmmaker from the East Bay Area. In March, I launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $25,000 for my first feature film, Jinn. Jinn is a coming-of-age drama about a teenage black girl named Summer whose life is turned upside down when her mother abruptly converts to Islam and becomes a different person, prompting Summer to reevaluate her life and identity. It’s a fun, fresh exploration of millennial culture, Islam, and first love. Since the campaign ended, fellow independent filmmakers and colleagues have reached out to me for insight on how to […]

Jan Švankmajer, the 81-year-old surrealist Czech animator, along with his longtime producer Jaromír Kallista, has launched an Indiegogo campaign to fund the filmmaker’s final project, Insects. Švankmajer, known for his dark but playful satirical works, has directed over 30 short and feature-length films throughout his career including Alice, Little Otik, and Dimensions of Dialogue. As a pioneer of stop-motion animation, he has had a direct influence on the works of Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, David Lynch, and the Brothers Quay, among many others. Švankmajer wrote the screenplay for Insects, which is loosely based on “The Insect Play” by the Čapek brothers, an allegorical comedy from 1922 […]

Though he wrote the novel on which David Fincher’s 1999 hit Fight Club was adapted, novelist Chuck Palahniuk has never written a screenplay. That will change with the upcoming film adaptation of the author’s 2002 novel Lullaby. Palahniuk will executive produce and co-write the screenplay with director Andy Mingo. Along with producer Josh Leake, the team has turned to Kickstarter to raise $250,000 to fund production of the film. Lullaby follows the life of Carl Streator, an over-the-hill reporter whose family mysteriously died years earlier. Palahniuk wrote the novel during the murder trial of the man eventually convicted of murdering his father. “Chuck doesn’t […]

Raising over $1.1 million on Kickstarter, Who the F*@% is Frank Zappa (working title) recently shattered the crowdfunding record for a documentary project, previously held by the Bill Nye film. Directed by Alex Winter (Deep Web), the film is an authorized exploration of the iconic musician’s life and work. Of course, the project benefited from Zappa’s name recognition and hardcore fan base. But that alone isn’t enough to carry a crowdfunding campaign. In order to drive engagement, the filmmakers extended the campaign far beyond Kickstarter itself with coordinated benefit screening events of Zappa’s concert film Roxy: The Movie around the world, additional “Add On Rewards” including […]

Despite outliers such as Alex Ross Perry and Todd Haynes, the general consensus among independent filmmakers is that shooting on film is too expensive to be feasible. Over the past year, Kodak has been working to get the word out that shooting on film is a possibility – even for low-budget indies. Along with Kickstarter, the Eastman Kodak Company today announced a new initiative to support independent filmmakers who want to shoot on film. The program is open to cinematographers launching a Kickstarter campaign in order to bring their vision to life using 35mm or 16mm film. Four directors with upcoming Kickstarter campaigns […]

It was 1973 and Peter Medak was a hot director on the rise. Following the success of The Ruling Class, which had earned Peter O’Toole an Academy Award nomination the previous year, United Artists offered him Death Wish. But when the studio insisted on casting Charles Bronson instead of Medak’s pick, Henry Fonda, Medak passed on the project. Back in London, Medak ran into his friend Peter Sellers, who asked him to direct his next film, Ghost in The Noonday Sun, which was set to be filmed on the island of Cyprus. Somehow the idea of filming a 17th-century pirate comedy aboard real ships on […]

You’ve seen the abysmal statistics about women filmmakers, yet they still manage to shock. According to a recent study by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, the number of women directing the top 250 grossing films declined by 2% over the past 17 years. And that’s just one measurement. In 2013, Amy Hobby and Anne Hubbell launched Tangerine Entertainment with the express purpose of giving voice to more female directors. Now they are raising funds on Seed&Spark to support The Juice Fund, an annual award which recognizes women directors who have […]

Producer Peter Phok (The Sacrament, The Innkeepers, V/H/S) is one of five professionals this morning at an IFP Screen Forward panel titled “Bridging the Gap after Crowdfunding.” The title of the panel is an interesting collision of terms as only recently has crowdfunding been factored into independent film financing equations alongside terms like “mezzanine,” “senior debt” and “tax credit monetization.” But, indeed, crowdfunding is part of many independent films’ financing schemes, and its success — or failure — has much to do with a film’s greenlight. Below, Phok answers questions about film and crowdfunding. Filmmaker: Your panel is called, “Bridging […]

Emily Best is the founder and CEO of Seed&Spark, a crowdfunding and distribution platform for independent filmmakers. She’s also the publisher of Bright Ideas Magazine. Emily has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in crowdfunding for film and contributed to over 300 campaigns to date through Seed&Spark. She brings experience from producing live theater and running restaurants to the film industry, and she lets us into the world of investors and film distribution. Emily travels to festivals and conferences around the world on the #stayindietour and was named one of the 2013 Indiewire Influencers, 2014 New York Women of Influence, […]

At first, I viewed the Indiegogo campaign to help finish Orson Welles’ last film as a desperate attempt to solve a troubled situation. I was hauling in all my feelings about the Kickstarter saturation that has infected indie film culture. Everyone and their mother is crowdfunding their films — now the late Orson Welles? It felt like a violation against his legacy and made me incredibly sad. After all of this time, Orson Welles still can’t raise money the “normal” way?! But now, after much thought and digging, I see the campaign as a triumphant way to actively and symbolically help […]

Randy Mack is in the final three days of his Kickstarter for his New Orleans-set Laundry Day, and with roughly three grand to go, he lets loose with an acerbic howl against the indignities of crowdfunding that, he hopes, might make you think and, perhaps…. donate. People are the worst, and there’s nothing more humiliating than pandering to them. You became an artist to push back against sheeple’s sacred cows and conventional wisdom, and now technology has risen to empower… them. Not you. The Popular Ones. The last people on Earth who need empowering. Popular people, remember them? The ones […]

The term ‘hybrid’ has become increasingly debatable when discussing the divide between fiction and nonfiction, though it’s a rather apt description of the French artist Pierre Bismuth’s cinematic inquiry, Where is Rocky II? Perhaps best known for his Oscar winning collaboration with Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry on the script for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Bismuth became obsessed with a fake rock, called Rocky II, that Ed Ruscha placed amongst its geological counterparts in the Mojave Desert around the release of the eponymous Stallone film in 1979. The pitch of Where is Rocky II?, Bismuth explained in an email, “is that a […]

Crowdsunite, a website that specializes in crowdfunding reviews like only a millennial startup could, recently compiled a list of the industry’s top 10 platforms based on user reviews. Weighing the funding success rate, customer support and user friendliness, Crowdsunite concluded that the niche hybrid Seed&Spark ranked higher than Kickstarter, while the likes of IndieGogo and GoFundMe didn’t even make the cut. A plausible reason for this is that the survey considered platforms that cater across several industries (publishing, medical), but the reasons behind their viability are nonetheless worth considering for your next campaign. While users have frequently taken issue with Kickstarter’s “all […]

“Red Letter Media is Creating Weird Internet Videos and Films” is the tagline for the Milwaukee-based collective’s page on online fundraising platform Patreon. It’s an appeal that has impressively generated the group almost $100,000 a year in fan donations. Red Letter Media is the home of various creators, including Mike Stoklasa, whose critical vivisections of George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels landed him on Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2010. Offering reviews of films and video games alongside other content (like a comedic instructional feature film, How Not to Make a Movie), Red Letter monetizes itself through YouTube advertising, DVD […]

The following is a guest post from director, writer and actress Bethany Orr, whose untitled Iceland-set, psychosexual drama is currently raising funds on Indiegogo in a campaign titled “Iceland or Bust.” Click here at the link to learn more and to support the project. Okay, so you’re not Zach Braff. The market is saturated with projects competing for attention and the hard-earned dollars of YOUR potential supporters. So why crowdfund in 2014? Hasn’t that train left the station? I mean, it’s a huge risk, what if you embarrass yourself? Crowdfunding is, after all, the quickest new way to get unfollowed […]