Can someone help me pick crowfuding site for my film?

D

davidevans10

I dont know much about them and its my first time.

Maybe ask me what details about my film would help and i will answer them

Thanks
 
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Main choice seems to be between kickstarter or indiegogo. The primary difference is that kickstarter is an all-or-nothing deal - either you hit your funding goal, or you don't get any of the money. Indiegogo can work that way, but most people use the whatever-you-get mode where even if you don't hit your funding goal you get to keep what you did raise - but I believe you pay a higher percentage to them if you don't hit the goal. There's probably other differences in the percentage you'll pay, I haven't compared them recently so you'll have to check out their individual terms for details.

Other than that they're pretty similar - and they're just tools to facilitate the process. Whether your project succeeds or fails on either one depends entirely on the work you put in elsewhere, so I wouldn't worry too much about which one to use as it's probably the least important part of the process.

As for details on your specific project, here's the important ones - how big an audience do currently you have access to? What have you done so far to build that audience and awareness of you and your film? What are your marketing plans for the campaign?
 
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ItDonnedOnMe said:
Main choice seems to be between kickstarter or indiegogo. The primary difference is that kickstarter is an all-or-nothing deal - either you hit your funding goal, or you don't get any of the money. Indiegogo can work that way, but most people use the whatever-you-get mode where even if you don't hit your funding goal you get to keep what you did raise - but I believe you pay a higher percentage to them if you don't hit the goal. There's probably other differences in the percentage you'll pay, I haven't compared them recently so you'll have to check out their individual terms for details.

Other than that they're pretty similar - and they're just tools to facilitate the process. Whether your project succeeds or fails on either one depends entirely on the work you put in elsewhere, so I wouldn't worry too much about which one to use as it's probably the least important part of the process.

As for details on your specific project, here's the important ones - how big an audience do currently you have access to? What have you done so far to build that audience and awareness of you and your film? What are your marketing plans for the campaign?
Click to expand...

why would anyone choose the kickstarter then? on the other hand i feel these crowdfunding sites can be lottery efforts for people with weak projects and just no money. This has got to been said before.
 
KS and IG are the 2 largest crowdfunding sites.
This means more people know, use and visit them.
You'll have to read and compare.

One thing you will need to understand:
crowdfunding is only a lottery (you will probably loose) if you put no effort in your campaign.
Otherwise it is just hard work that will reach it's goal or not.

A few things are essential:
- a network/crowd/fanbase you can reach even before you start the campaign
- a strategy to reach your crowd and beyond (by 'activating your crowd') through social media and media
- have some press releases prepared
- a great video that makes people want to participate*

*some requirements:
- show you have the technical skills to make a good video: a crappy one will make people move on
- show great storytelling: a boring video will make people move on (and if you can't make a compelling campaign video, why would we trust you can make a good movie?)
- show you are a filmmaker: this is the hard part if you never made a video before. (So my recurring advice keeps coming back like a mantra: make something smaller first.) Having a great experienced DOP on board can help to compensate that a little bit.
- end with a call to action

In short: the video needs to give people convidence you know what you are doing and that you are able to finish the project. It needs to inspire people to help you in either making donation and/or by spreading your campaign.

A big part of the crowdfunding campaigns fail because:
- the video is bad (technically bad, or boring as hell)
- the campaign wasn't prepared very well (tweeting it 3 times to 5 followers won't be enough)
- people tend to forget normal press still exists: you need to use more than social media
- people don't do the effort the campaign needs to spread and stay top of mind (this means making updates, blogging, sending press releases with updates during the campaign as well
- they are inexperienced with big ambitions and talk only about themselves
- the rewards are not attractive (but mind you: make calculations most rewards cost time and money to give, so if the rewards are to big, you'll lose money instead of raising it. If the rewards are too small, nobody cares about them.)
- people try to crowdfund to buy gear. (Most people don't want to buy a stranger's new toys)

And last but not least:
- the projects don't sound interesting or doable

Another interesting read about crowdfunding experiences from IT-members:
http://www.indietalk.com/showthread.php?t=39742
 
WalterB said:
KS and IG are the 2 largest crowdfunding sites.
This means more people know, use and visit them.
You'll have to read and compare.

One thing you will need to understand:
crowdfunding is only a lottery (you will probably loose) if you put no effort in your campaign.
Otherwise it is just hard work that will reach it's goal or not.

A few things are essential:
- a network/crowd/fanbase you can reach even before you start the campaign
- a strategy to reach your crowd and beyond (by 'activating your crowd') through social media and media
- have some press releases prepared
- a great video that makes people want to participate*

*some requirements:
- show you have the technical skills to make a good video: a crappy one will make people move on
- show great storytelling: a boring video will make people move on (and if you can't make a compelling campaign video, why would we trust you can make a good movie?)
- show you are a filmmaker: this is the hard part if you never made a video before. (So my recurring advice keeps coming back like a mantra: make something smaller first.) Having a great experienced DOP on board can help to compensate that a little bit.
- end with a call to action

In short: the video needs to give people convidence you know what you are doing and that you are able to finish the project. It needs to inspire people to help you in either making donation and/or by spreading your campaign.

A big part of the crowdfunding campaigns fail because:
- the video is bad (technically bad, or boring as hell)
- the campaign wasn't prepared very well (tweeting it 3 times to 5 followers won't be enough)
- people tend to forget normal press still exists: you need to use more than social media
- people don't do the effort the campaign needs to spread and stay top of mind (this means making updates, blogging, sending press releases with updates during the campaign as well
- they are inexperienced with big ambitions and talk only about themselves
- the rewards are not attractive (but mind you: make calculations most rewards cost time and money to give, so if the rewards are to big, you'll lose money instead of raising it. If the rewards are too small, nobody cares about them.)
- people try to crowdfund to buy gear. (Most people don't want to buy a stranger's new toys)

And last but not least:
- the projects don't sound interesting or doable

Another interesting read about crowdfunding experiences from IT-members:
http://www.indietalk.com/showthread.php?t=39742
Click to expand...


my crowdfunding isnt so much about starting up the project. Mine is being worked on. I dont feel i have the time or means to get people interested beforehadn since i dont spend much time on social media nor do i want to and wouldnt know where to start.

Having a good video/cause and something people can get into in indie gogo could be enough to meet your goals couldnt it?


thanks alot for all this . Thats great
 
davidevans10 said:
Having a good video/cause and something people can get into in indie gogo could be enough to meet your goals couldnt it?
Click to expand...


Sure it could. But the question is, have you ever seen a "good video/cause" and paid any money?

I plan on doing a kickstarter campaign myself. But I plan on raising almost nothing beyond friends and family. If I'm not Charlie Sheen or Zach Braff, why on earth would anybody pay for MY dreams? If you're raising money for a cause, that's something else. If you're raising money for your career, well, then there has to be some other things involved, and I don't know what they are (celebrity, fanbase maybe). If you pin your film funding hopes on crowdfunding alone, you're probably going to be disappointed.

Cheers
 
davidevans10 said:
why would anyone choose the kickstarter then?
Click to expand...

As a contributor I generally prefer the all-or-nothing model of kickstarter - it requires you to be more realistic about your goals and your needs. If you ask for too much the campaign fails. If you aren't putting a lot of effort into the campaign it fails. If you don't have enough interest in or demand for your project it fails. I tend to be more confident that someone who can leap the hurdle of having to make the campaign a success will be more likely to make it over all the other hurdles that come along the way of making a film. So I'm more likely to contribute, and likely to contribute more, to an all-or-nothing campaign.

davidevans10 said:
Having a good video/cause and something people can get into in indie gogo could be enough to meet your goals couldnt it?
Click to expand...

Buying a lottery ticket could be enough to meet your goals as well - and if you're counting on people just discovering your project by accident the odds of succeeding are roughly the same.

I've been directly involved in one KS campaign for $20k. We had three regionally known comedians as the main subject of the project - between them they had about 15,000 twitter followers and they tweeted about it constantly, as well as cross posting to facebook, etc. They talked about it at every show they performed. One was on the cover of a local weekly as "Best Comedian" of the area and promoted the campaign in his interview. They did interviews on local radio. They went on podcasts with hundreds of thousands of weekly listeners. They got several nationally known comedians to tweet about it and even do short videos promoting it. We hit the $20k goal roughly a day before the (30 day) campaign ended - we were getting really nervous there at the end.

So if you're not willing or able to put that kind of time, effort and work into your campaign your odds of raising any significant funding are pretty slim. And if you haven't already put in the time to build a potential audience or community of fans then it's going to be even more of an uphill battle - successful crowdfunding really starts long before the campaign starts, often years before.

I dont feel i have the time or means to get people interested beforehadn since i dont spend much time on social media nor do i want to and wouldnt know where to start.
Click to expand...

Well, that's it right there then - crowdfunding isn't for you.
 
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davidevans10 said:
why would anyone choose the kickstarter then?
Click to expand...

I for one don't contribute to flexible funding campaigns unless they're already very close to hitting their goal. I'm sure lots of people feel the same as me.

If you set a goal of $10K, that should be how much you need to make your film. If I contribute $50, then you only raise $2K, you can't make your film, but you have got my money. Some people then say "If I only raise $2K, I'll make the film for that". Sure you could, but I'd have paid $50 towards what I believed would be a $10K film.

No thanks. Go with fixed funding.
 
mad_hatter said:
I for one don't contribute to flexible funding campaigns unless they're already very close to hitting their goal. I'm sure lots of people feel the same as me.
Click to expand...

Since I'm planning a campaign myself, I'm curious how much you have donated so far for films. It's difficult for me to believe that this is a normal thing for people to do, to fund films of strangers, so I'm curious how much and how often people actually donate.

I personally have funded $100 in total to two filmmakers, both of whom I know and who've worked on my films for free. I was just repaying them back, but I wouldn't have funded them if I hadn't known them.

I also paid $50 to an atheist lady in Oklahoma to help rebuild her house after a tornado destroyed it, but that's only because CNN's coverage of the lady pissed me off to no end. In this case there was an emotional component. Were I rich, I would have donated more to the lady.

Edit: Here's the campaign for the atheist lady. As you can see, it pissed off a lot of atheists. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/atheists-unite
 
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helpmeshort said:
I have a campaign with indiegogo for my short film you really have to push your campaign
check it out everyone https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/turn-short-film-into-feature-film/x/8936274
Click to expand...

So here's the other thing - as important as the marketing and promotion part of things is, if you don't also have a compelling project & campaign you're wasting your time promoting it.

Unfortunately this particular campaign is a perfect example of what not to do, in almost every aspect...

- A generic title - "Turn Short Film Into Feature Film"
- Two short paragraphs describing the project
- $250,000 campaign goal with nothing to indicate they're capable of producing a feature film
- Absolutely no information about the people behind it
- No detailed information about what the funding is actually for - just "making a movie"
- No campaign video, just the 15 minute short film they're trying to turn into a feature
- The short film has a watermark in the middle from the demo video converter they used to compress it
- The short currently has 163 views on youtube
- The budget for the short was apparently $4500, but there's no indication where the money went on the technical side:
- it looks like it was shot on DV
- it uses existing lighting
- it essentially takes place in a single drab apartment
- it looks like it took no more than a single day to shoot
- both the live sound and sound fx are poor
- Technical shortcomings aside, the film is also not particularly strong creatively:
- pacing is overly slow
- editing is weak; you could cut the running time in half and not really lose anything
- the premise could have promise but the execution is completely unbelievable/unrealistic (911 operators don't work from home, and don't ask for and verbally relay addresses to responders)
- acting isn't very strong
- for a thriller there is no real sense of danger, suspense, no scares, etc


The whole campaign essentially comes across as someone who made their first video one day and then decided that the next logical step is to raise a quarter million to make a feature. It's not surprising that a week into the campaign they've raised just $1 towards their goal. It's completely unrealistic, and no amount of promotion is going to make their campaign a success.
 
trueindie said:
Since I'm planning a campaign myself, I'm curious how much you have donated so far for films. It's difficult for me to believe that this is a normal thing for people to do, to fund films of strangers, so I'm curious how much and how often people actually donate.
Click to expand...

I've contributed $300 on indiegogo and $350 on Kickstarter, to a total of about 10 different projects - most were people i knew in some way, but only a couple were people I know personally in 'real life'. Most are people I've had some interaction with online, either here or other forums. Half were films, one was a comic book, two were products, and a couple were for other kinds of projects.

In general I don't seek out crowdfunding campaigns to contribute to - but I'm willing to support a project I think has merit when I hear about it. I've probably checked out 10x as many campaigns as I've contributed to though.
 
trueindie said:
Sure it could. But the question is, have you ever seen a "good video/cause" and paid any money?

I plan on doing a kickstarter campaign myself. But I plan on raising almost nothing beyond friends and family. If I'm not Charlie Sheen or Zach Braff, why on earth would anybody pay for MY dreams? If you're raising money for a cause, that's something else. If you're raising money for your career, well, then there has to be some other things involved, and I don't know what they are (celebrity, fanbase maybe). If you pin your film funding hopes on crowdfunding alone, you're probably going to be disappointed.

Cheers
Click to expand...

no thats what i mean i dont need this for the be all and end all of my film. My video will show a valid film almost made. My funding is for marketing
 
trueindie said:
Sure it could. But the question is, have you ever seen a "good video/cause" and paid any money?

I plan on doing a kickstarter campaign myself. But I plan on raising almost nothing beyond friends and family. If I'm not Charlie Sheen or Zach Braff, why on earth would anybody pay for MY dreams? If you're raising money for a cause, that's something else. If you're raising money for your career, well, then there has to be some other things involved, and I don't know what they are (celebrity, fanbase maybe). If you pin your film funding hopes on crowdfunding alone, you're probably going to be disappointed.

Cheers
Click to expand...

i dont quite understand. People give money to bad videos or causes?
 
ItDonnedOnMe said:
As a contributor I generally prefer the all-or-nothing model of kickstarter - it requires you to be more realistic about your goals and your needs. If you ask for too much the campaign fails. If you aren't putting a lot of effort into the campaign it fails. If you don't have enough interest in or demand for your project it fails. I tend to be more confident that someone who can leap the hurdle of having to make the campaign a success will be more likely to make it over all the other hurdles that come along the way of making a film. So I'm more likely to contribute, and likely to contribute more, to an all-or-nothing campaign.



Buying a lottery ticket could be enough to meet your goals as well - and if you're counting on people just discovering your project by accident the odds of succeeding are roughly the same.

I've been directly involved in one KS campaign for $20k. We had three regionally known comedians as the main subject of the project - between them they had about 15,000 twitter followers and they tweeted about it constantly, as well as cross posting to facebook, etc. They talked about it at every show they performed. One was on the cover of a local weekly as "Best Comedian" of the area and promoted the campaign in his interview. They did interviews on local radio. They went on podcasts with hundreds of thousands of weekly listeners. They got several nationally known comedians to tweet about it and even do short videos promoting it. We hit the $20k goal roughly a day before the (30 day) campaign ended - we were getting really nervous there at the end.

So if you're not willing or able to put that kind of time, effort and work into your campaign your odds of raising any significant funding are pretty slim. And if you haven't already put in the time to build a potential audience or community of fans then it's going to be even more of an uphill battle - successful crowdfunding really starts long before the campaign starts, often years before.



Well, that's it right there then - crowdfunding isn't for you.
Click to expand...

I dont agree. having a real project that should be seen is reason enough. i"m just learning here. Spending years on lame ideas to basically steal money from people is not more valid.
 
ItDonnedOnMe said:
So here's the other thing - as important as the marketing and promotion part of things is, if you don't also have a compelling project & campaign you're wasting your time promoting it.

Unfortunately this particular campaign is a perfect example of what not to do, in almost every aspect...

- A generic title - "Turn Short Film Into Feature Film"
- Two short paragraphs describing the project
- $250,000 campaign goal with nothing to indicate they're capable of producing a feature film
- Absolutely no information about the people behind it
- No detailed information about what the funding is actually for - just "making a movie"
- No campaign video, just the 15 minute short film they're trying to turn into a feature
- The short film has a watermark in the middle from the demo video converter they used to compress it
- The short currently has 163 views on youtube
- The budget for the short was apparently $4500, but there's no indication where the money went on the technical side:
- it looks like it was shot on DV
- it uses existing lighting
- it essentially takes place in a single drab apartment
- it looks like it took no more than a single day to shoot
- both the live sound and sound fx are poor
- Technical shortcomings aside, the film is also not particularly strong creatively:
- pacing is overly slow
- editing is weak; you could cut the running time in half and not really lose anything
- the premise could have promise but the execution is completely unbelievable/unrealistic (911 operators don't work from home, and don't ask for and verbally relay addresses to responders)
- acting isn't very strong
- for a thriller there is no real sense of danger, suspense, no scares, etc


The whole campaign essentially comes across as someone who made their first video one day and then decided that the next logical step is to raise a quarter million to make a feature. It's not surprising that a week into the campaign they've raised just $1 towards their goal. It's completely unrealistic, and no amount of promotion is going to make their campaign a success.
Click to expand...


Those lottery mentalities i was mentioning haha
 
davidevans10 said:
i dont quite understand. People give money to bad videos or causes?
Click to expand...

No, that's not what I implied, that people give money to bad videos or causes. My implication was that just because it's a good video doesn't mean people give money. Why don't you answer my question about the last "good" video you paid money to. If your answer is that you paid money, just because the video was good, then I guess you have nothing to worry about. Just make a good video, and people will pay you money.
 
trueindie said:
No, that's not what I implied, that people give money to bad videos or causes. My implication was that just because it's a good video doesn't mean people give money. Why don't you answer my question about the last "good" video you paid money to. If your answer is that you paid money, just because the video was good, then I guess you have nothing to worry about. Just make a good video, and people will pay you money.
Click to expand...

you could just say it more straight up. That question you asked seems rhetorical . Anyways people were saying you need marketing before the crowdfunding . Thats silly. you can convey everything you want and what your doing and have a great video all at once. And create marketing there.

People on here seem to try to make the trivial complicated as to make what the do more important.
 
davidevans10 said:
you could just say it more straight up. That question you asked seems rhetorical .
Click to expand...
I'm trying my damndest to be straight up. But my question was rhetorical. I'm trying to give you something to think about. I'm trying to tell you that other people will behave like you behave. If you haven't paid for a good video, then I don't see how you would conclude that other people will pay you for a good video. That's my point.

People on here seem to try to make the trivial complicated as to make what the do more important.
Click to expand...

This is a trait with filmmakers everywhere. Not just here. But some things are not trivial. I've read this thread thoroughly. Everybody here has tried to provide good advice. In fact, I myself learned a lot from this thread.

I am about to do my own campaign, so I'm participating on this thread with interest. I'm trying to tell you that it is probably harder than it looks. I've gone through 100s of campaigns. 100s. I've come to some conclusions about what works, and what doesn't work. I'm not sure I'm right, but I've come to some conclusions nonetheless. I've come to some conclusions about what the right target is for a film. I've come to conclusions about what the right target is for MY film. If you must know, my target is Ten dollars ($10). I did not just come up with it out of the blue. I've been thinking about it for months now. I've already spoken to kickstarter about it and they have advised me against it, even referred me to some of their rules. I'm doing it anyway.

I wish you luck. It is not my intention to brush you off. I was trying to get you to think about the subject in a different way. That's all.
 
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