Reddit Users Opine On Crowdfunding For Film: “Is It Dead?”

bb-redditEvery once in a while an interesting conversation pops up on Reddit involving crowdfunding and the public’s perception of crowdfunding as a means of raising money. Recently Reddit user mavspade solicited opinions on crowdfunding as a way of raising money for films, asking on subreddit /r/Filmmakers “is it dead?” (Short answer: no) Specifically, the user postulates that sites like Kickstarter are oversaturated and favor filmmakers with huge existing networks of friends and fans. The responses were mixed, some surprising and some standard…

Well… yeah. Save for the odd project, most successful kickstarters are simply a way to ask your existing audience for money. I’m sure a little research will reveal that the amount of projects that benefit from random discovery or blow up in the media is extremely small – of course because of the exposure it can skew expectations.kissmyrobot

I just recently funded my first short film through Kickstarter. “http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/902245474/daimons-a-short-film?ref=activity” We though we would get much more random discovery then we did. Instead it was mostly friends and family of the project who donated. Everyone wanted to make something, so everyone was willing to pitch in a bit. The only reason we succeeded was our very low goal mark. We won’t be using it again, the novelty just isn’t worth it. Next time, we will just get a loan and take a month off of our real jobs.talon006

Funded With Kickstarter

Yeah funding short films through kickstarter is a lot of effort and again does it even cover the cost of production and post? Curious enough would you take out a loan for a short film, due to fact profit from shorts is next to nothing. Seems like quite the cost to make one.mavspade

I would say that kickstarters are a legitimate and efficient form of pulling in donations from a very wide target audience, but it’s interesting in your point about the crowd funding marketplace being overrun with film/short films/webseries because I have seen more and more ambitious kickstarters start to fail. I would agree with your point that the marketplace is so over saturated and overused that it makes the act of donating through those sites not as special to many people, which obviously correlates to less donations and less projects meeting their goals. Thinking about all this, it’s almost like Kickstarter once had a pure intent and there were people out there who legitimately used it for modest fundraising purposes, but now every filmmaker has diamonds in their eyes and use it as a main source of funding, asking for an asinine amount of money to fund their next short.HeyMitchell

Read the entire conversation at Reddit



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