interesting... I was designing a website for someone a while back with a similar idea. He was planning on publicly funding a film ($25 got your name in the credits, $50 got you some merch too) and releasing it for free afterwards. He put it on hiatus due to some personal issues though.
This sounds like it could be much more high profile than that - Cory Doctorow is an advisor, the guy who directed Meeting People is Easy is the DP, and the Kleptones are doing the soundtrack.
It's still a great idea and I really hope this works, and gets some press, and inspires other filmmakers to do similar things. There's a lot of great things going on right now involving the before and after of filmmaking - how they're financed and how they're distributed - and it's all very exciting. Things like DV are making it much cheaper to make films (of course DV isn't the only option... Primer won Sundance, and is a great film to boot, with a budget of $7000... and it was shot on 16mm) and people like these guys, or like Nothing So Strange, or like Soderberg with Bubble (I heard that the film was shit, but that's not the point) are really starting to challenge the traditional methods of distribution.
My real hope is that this thing starts a movement. That five or ten years from now things like this are common, that this sort of thing becomes a viable alternative to the "making films on a shoestring budget, crossing your fingers, and whoring yourself to distributors at festivals" method when it comes to how independent films are financed/distributed.
Did I mention that I'm a filmmaker? |
