Sunday, November 5

Crowdfunding / people-powered film / community driven financing

Regarding His Fans Greenlight the Project, Robert Greenwald Tapped a New Funding Source: The Audience
by William Booth, Washington Post, Sunday, August 20, 2006

From: NETRIBUTION - People-powered film financing raises $267,000 from 4 emails in 9 days

Adam P Davies and I have recently begun work on a new film funding book - an update to the One With The Pig on the Front. One of the things I'm most interested in this time round, following on from the Cluetrain stuff, is community-driven financing, and in particular how filmmakers who communicate directly with their audience online can bypass conventional sales and financing methods to some extent.


Tell me if this isn't what videoblogging is all about.

Well Robert Greenwald, who Stephen Applebaum interviewed for his Wal Mart documentary earlier this year, recently completed Iraq for Sale which gets a showing at the Leeds Film Festival next week. Struggling to complete the finance on the film, with producer Jim
Gillam, Greenwald emailed everyone who had previously bought copies of the film. Four emails and nine days
later, just over 3000 people had raised more than $267,000, which in
turn released another conditional $100,000 from a philanthropist. Film financed, industry reinvented, job done. I hope to case study this in full in the book, but meantime, here's a Wall Street Journal article telling more.


From Michael Sullivan Crowdfunding.com | People-powered film funding

This article was brought to my attention tonight and it's a GREAT example of Crowdfunding.

Smart use of the Internet to raise money!

Four emails and nine days later, just over 3000 people had raised more than $267,000


Call it community driven financing, crowdfunding, people-powered film or whatever you like but we're starting to see a repetive theme where a whole industry of middle men are being bypassed... where the audience and the artists are connecting directly to fund projects in art, music, film and media.

Read more about Crowdfunding on Wikipedia.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love this topic.
It is so inspiring to see people coming together this way. Especially when crowdfunding supports worldcentric visions such as with Greenwald's documentary.

Michael Meiser said...

I'm glad you saw that Jen. I was thinking of the Echo Chamber project when I wrote it.

We need to do more to organize and keep tabs on such projects.

I think I might have something that just might work.

Oh, and there's also have money will vlog.

Perhaps I should put together a list on mefeedia. I've already maid quite a few guides there on related topics.

http://mefeedia.com/lists