May 14, 2025 • 25 mins
In this episode, Jeff Deverett dives into crowdfunding and equity funding for your indie film project. He shares valuable insights on how to get donations and the importance of offering rewards for different donation levels. Jeff also explains how to effectively pitch your campaign, even without having any footage of your film.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
A lot of people believe that the way to get
their film financed is through crowdfunding. I am not a
huge believer in crowdfunding for film financing, but because so
many people talk about it, I want to do an
episode on it and explain it in detail and explain
why I believe what I do. If you want to
(00:21):
be a successful indie filmmaker, you need to know a
lot about not just the production of movies, but the business.
We are going to tell you the truth and reality
of what really happens in the indie film business. Okay,
So crowdfunding is as the name says, it's basically getting
(00:44):
funding from a crowd of people. And the crowd of
people is the general public. So how do you connect
with the general public. It's not easy to do that.
Like you can stand on a street corner with a
sign trying to attract people or accosting them as their
cross the street, or doing you know that kind of thing.
It's not gonna work. You'll intimidate people. Some smart people
(01:06):
got together and said, hey, we've got another way of
connecting with the general public with a wide, wide array
of people who might be interested in looking at various
projects and they created these online platforms, which we call
crowdfunding platforms. So there are specific ones that are really
(01:26):
good for funding movies, or funding components of movies, or
primarily I'm going to say short films. But a lot
of filmmakers say to me, I'm going to raise the
money for my movie on a crowdfunding platform. And I say,
you're not going to raise seven hundred thousand dollars on
a crowdfunding platform. Okay, maybe you're going to raise five
thousand if you're doing a short film. Maybe you're going
(01:49):
to raise ten, fifteen, twenty thousand dollars. Maybe for the
development or scriptwriting or something like that of a feature.
Maybe if you're really lucky and you work super hard,
maybe you'll get fifty thousand. Now, once in a while,
somebody gets a couple hundred thousand. The odd person has
gotten over five hundred thousand, all right, But that is
(02:09):
kind of like saying, hey, I'm gonna win a lottery.
So most people don't win lotteries. Tens of millions of
people buy tickets and very few people win. So what
I'm saying to you, it's not a good business plan
or a business strategy to say my business plan is
to win the lottery. If you get lucky and you
win the lottery, wonderful, But don't make that your plan,
(02:30):
all right. That is basically crowdfunding. Don't say I'm gonna
do a crowdfunding campaign and I'm gonna get half a
million dollars. That would be like saying I'm gonna win
the lottery. The likelihood of that happening is so low.
The truth is, if you get fifty thousand dollars, you've
done really, really, really well. So don't think that you're
going to fund a full length feature film at seven
(02:52):
hundred thousand dollars through a crowdfunding campaign. Believe and understand
that you're going to maybe get the development funding or
the scriptwriting funding if at the beginning of the project,
or maybe some finishing funding or something like that. But
I'm also going to tell you it's super time consuming,
super difficult. There's a lot to know about how crowdfunding works,
so let's talk about it, all right. So crowdfunding is
(03:14):
basically you're going to do a campaign where you're going
to reach out to the general public to say, hey,
here's what I'm doing. Are you interested? Would you like
to give me some funding. There's three sort of main
platforms that people use to crowdfund for indie films. There's
other platforms, but the three main ones are Kickstarter, indie
go Go, and Seed and spark Seed and spark is
(03:37):
only for artistic projects, all right, for films and plays
and publishing and music. Right it's only for art indie
go Go and Kickstarter are for everything. Films is only
one category. They also do all kinds of inventions, all
kinds of new devices, things like you know, games, and
(03:59):
different marketing properties, all kinds of stuff. So films is
only one category on those two sites. As a matter
of fact, it's not the biggest category. Inventions are in
science and technology and biotech that type of thing, but
it's still a pretty big category. You can go on
to say indiegog, Seeden, Sparker or Kickstarter and create a
(04:21):
campaign and here's how it works, and you should check
it out. You can check out each of them. I'll
start with Kickstarter, all right, because Kickstarter is still the
biggest of the platforms, even though one could argue that
Indiegogo was bigger that I'll explain the difference in a minute.
So let's see you go on to Kickstarter and you say,
I'm going to start a campaign where I'm going to
put my film up and I'm going to ask people
(04:43):
to give me money. So the first question is how
do they give money. So on these platforms, this is
what we call reward crowdfunding, and the people give the
money as a donation. They are not investing in your movie.
They are not getting any equity in your movie. They're
not a partner with you. They are actually not even
(05:04):
expecting to get their money back. They are donating their
money to you. It is a strict one hundred percent donation.
You get the money, they give it to you, You
get to use it for your project. You don't have
to give them anything back. The reason we call it
reward crowdfunding is because generally the way these campaigns work
(05:24):
is that you give them a prize back based on
their level of donation, otherwise known as a reward a prize.
All right, So maybe at the lowest level, maybe you're
asking somebody to donate ten dollars, and in the case
of a movie, maybe you say you're going to give
them a screening link to the movie when it's finished.
That's going to be their reward that they're going to
(05:44):
get to watch the movie when it's finished. That's for
ten dollars. Maybe at twenty five dollars, maybe they get
a digital copy of the script. Maybe at fifty dollars
they get a thank you on the movie. Maybe at
one hundred dollars they get all those things, the screening copy,
the digital copy of the script, credit in the movie,
(06:05):
and then they get maybe some other type of reward.
Maybe they get to do an online meet and greet
with the director. Maybe at the next level they get
some type of true jacket or something like that. Now
I'm going to tell you it's better not to do
anything that's physical. Don't be sending clothes, don't be sending
(06:25):
physical posters, don't be sending all that kind of stuff.
It's so hard to manage that, especially when you get
into clothing. It's different sizes and styles and female versus
male and all this kind of stuff. So it's better
to do all your rewards as digital. But as the
levels go up, they generally build on each other to
get everything from the previous level plus the new thing,
(06:45):
and it could go up to I don't know, one thousand, five,
ten thousand, dollars for maybe an executive producer credit on
the movie and on IMDb, and maybe somebody is willing
to do that. So you're going to set up these
campaigns when you go online, and you're gonna see these campaigns,
and generally down the right side of the campaign is
the rewards. Here's the different levels of donation that we
(07:06):
would like you to make to our project, and here's
what we're going to give you the prize that we're
gonna give you for that donation. On the left side
of the campaign, it's going to be sort of outlining
the project that you're doing. It's going to be an overview,
a sort of a synopsis of the film you're making.
Then you're gonna talk a little bit about your team.
You're gonna maybe talk about use of your funds, like
(07:27):
when people donate, how you're going to use the funds,
and you're going to talk about just other elements of
when you're gonna shoot and the things that you require,
and just you know, potentially some of the distribution of
the genre or whatever, just things that make people interested
in the campaign. But the most important component of the
campaign is going to be the top left component, and
(07:49):
that is going to be a pitch video. So basically,
all of these campaigns, or all the good ones, have
a pitch video of talking about what the film's about,
or what they're going to use the funds for, or
why you should give them this donation. It's an art
to do the pitch video. Well, all right, Like anything else,
you're basically doing this video to ask people to give
(08:11):
you money. So I've seen hundreds of these pitch videos.
Some of them are fantastic, some of them are absolutely terrible,
depending on what you like. So remember, for the most part,
these videos are being made before the project is made,
so you don't have any footage, you haven't shot anything yet,
so you're doing this sort of outreach pitch video or
concept real to say to people, here's what I'm gonna do.
(08:33):
So oftentimes the pitch video is the producer and or
the director looking into the camera the way I'm looking
at you right now and saying, hey, everybody, this is
the project I'm making and it's going to be really cool,
and this is when we're gonna do it, and here's
what it's going to kind of look like. And it's
a talking head. And sometimes they go and they cut
(08:54):
to other footage. If they have anything that they've shot,
they'll cut to that. Sometimes they'll cut to, say, shots
from other movies that they borrowed, and we call that
a rip reel, sort of a concept reel, saying, hey,
this is what it's gonna look like, even though it's
clear it's not their movie, but they just need to
show something to explain what their movie's gonna look like.
Then maybe they'll introduce some other people on their team.
Maybe they'll introduce the actors. If they have actual footage
(09:17):
of something they've shot, depending on what they're raising the
funds for, maybe they'll introduce that as well. The videos
should be anywhere from two to three minutes long. I've
seen ten minute videos that bore the heck out of me.
They shouldn't be more than that because people don't want
to watch too much and you should be able to
get that information across pretty quickly. Now I am not
(09:38):
an expert in crowdfunding. I have done it before, I
teach it, I analyze it all the time, but frankly,
I don't love it. The reason I don't love it
is just the amount of work it takes to put
together one of these successful campaigns is often way more
than the amount that you're gonna raise, So like, I
value my time at a certain level and my effort,
(10:00):
and in some ways, making this campaign is almost harder
than making the film. Now, I know you need the money.
Like let's say you're making a short film. You need
five thousand dollars. It's almost as much, if not more
work to make the campaign to get the five thousand
then it would be to make the film. But you
need that five thousand to make the film because the
other component of raising money on a crowdfunding campaign is
(10:23):
not just creating the campaign, but it's doing outreach to
people to donate to that campaign. So even though your
film is up on a platform, say like Kickstarter, all right,
and all of the people who are on Kickstarter can
access it, it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to find
it or look for it, because there's hundreds and hundreds
of other campaigns that you're competing against, so people may
(10:47):
not see it, they may skip through it, or whatever.
They may not see it. So you have to spend
lots and lots of time on social media reaching out
to your network of friends and family and potential supporters
to let them know that you've launched a Kickstarter campaign
and that they should go on to Kickstarter to find
your campaign to donate to it. So that's also a
(11:07):
ton of work doing the social media stuff. Now I'm
not saying you shouldn't do this. I'm just saying a
lot of people say the same thing. It's just it's
a ton of work to do a really good campaign.
But you know, if it works and you get the money,
then it was worthwhile. So let's just spend a minute
and talk about sort of the differences between the platforms.
And again, these are all reward crowdfunding platforms where the
(11:27):
money's coming in as a donation, because in a minute
I'm going to talk about equity crowdfunding, which is different.
So Kickstarter is i think still the most popular. Now,
the major difference between Kickstarter and indiego Go and seed
in Spark is this is that Kickstarter is an all
or nothing campaign. You set a goal. All of these
campaigns set a goal. So you say, I want my
(11:49):
goal to be ten thousand dollars and usually these campaigns
run for sixty days. Now, normally they get most of
their funding in the first thirty days, but usually they
run them for sixty days, sometimes thirty days. I think
more and more they're doing shorter time spans because they
don't want to have to run it over two months.
They run it over one month thirty days. So let's
say you're saying in thirty days, I want to get
(12:09):
ten thousand dollars. You got to do a lot of
outreach and get a lot of people to come on
with Kickstarter. If you don't hit that ten thousand dollars level,
then you don't get anything. Even if you have donations
up to ninety seven hundred dollars, but you don't hit
your goal of ten thousand. People commit to a donation
by their credit card, but the credit card payment isn't
(12:31):
actually processed until the level is hit. Once the level
is hit on Kickstarter, then they process the credit cards
at the end of the campaign and say, okay, we
hit the level. Now we're going to give that money
to the filmmaker. If you don't hit your goal, you
get nothing, whereas on indie go go it doesn't matter
(12:52):
whether you hit your goal or not. Whatever amount you get,
they give it to you. So let's say at the
end of your thirty day campaign, you have raised half
of your goal five thousand dollars. They're going to process
the credit cards and send you the money of five
thousand dollars. You only got half your goal, you're gonna
get five thousand and on Seed and Spark, which is
primarily only for filmmaking, it's seventy five percent of your goal.
(13:16):
You have to hit seventy five percent. I believe that's
what it is. I should have checked it before. But
if you hit seventy five percent of your goal, then
you get to keep that money or anything in excess
to that. But if you don't get to seventy five
you get nothing. So it's kind of the hybrid between
Kickstarter and indiegog. So let's just look at that for
a second. Is it good or bad? Like one would say, like,
if I'm a filmmaker and I want to raise money,
(13:37):
why would I use Kickstarter when if I don't hit
my goal, I don't get anything. Wouldn't it be better
to use indiego go, where basically, no matter what I get,
I get to keep it. So remember I said, I
think Kickstarter is still the number one platform. And here's
the reason. If you're the donor, not the filmmaker, the
recipient of the funds, but the donor, somebody who's actually
(13:58):
donating the funds, wouldn't you rather give to a project
that you believe is actually going to get made at
the level that the filmmaker wants to make it. So
when a filmmaker says I need ten thousand dollars to
make my film properly, me as a donor, I'd say, yeah,
I okay, if you get ten thousand dollars and you
(14:18):
make your film properly. But if you only get five
thousand dollars, how are you gonna make a ten thousand
dollars film. So that's with Indiegogo. Basically, they say, okay,
here's the five thousand dollars, but you need a ten
to make the film. How are you going to make
a film for five thousand that you need a ten
for You're gonna have to do a heck of a
lot of compromising. But if you only get two thousand,
can you even make the film? Now you're gonna get
(14:41):
the money, it's gonna go to you, but you can't
even make the film. So a lot of donors say no, no, no,
We're willing to give if the campaign gets its goal.
Because then we know that the filmmaker actually make the
proper film, and that's what we're willing to support. But
a ton of business goes on in indigog And I'm
not saying it's a bad platform. It's a great platform.
And a lot of filmmakers say, I'd rather use any
(15:01):
googo just in case I don't hit my goal. I
want to get whatever I can, So I just say,
the challenge is, if you only get a small percentage
of the funds that you actually need to do your project,
how are you going to do the project properly? You're
going to be way too compromise, you're probably not going
to do it. And Seed and Spark is somewhere in
between that they say you could probably get your project
made it seventy five percent of your budget. You'd have
(15:22):
to compromise a few things, but we're willing to kind
of go at that level and compromise it, which one
could say is a fair compromise. So all of these
platforms are more or less similar in terms of their layouts,
in terms of the rewards that they offer, in terms
of the pitch video, the outline of the strategy, and
what the project is. Seed and Spark is a great
(15:44):
platform in terms of learning because they have tons and
tons of materials and kind of online seminars and things
like that about how to actually create a campaign, how
to promote your campaign, how to actually do crowdfunding. So
congrats to seeden Spark for putting that up. It's really
really informative. I point a lot of my students to
(16:05):
their resources if you want to learn how to do it.
Indigogs and Kickstarter have that too, but seeden Spark is
really focused on filmmaking and the arts. You should check
that out if you really want to understand how to
make a really compelling campaign that you know engages a
lot of people take the time to read it and
really understand it because they talk a lot about making
(16:28):
a proper pitch video and engaging materials and what the
project should be. That type of thing. So that is
what we call reward crowdfunding, and it's all about donations,
all right. All the funds you're getting are donations. Now,
there is another type of crowdfunding. It's called equity crowdfunding.
So equity crowdfunding is when you're asking people to invest
(16:51):
in your project. So in essence, what you're really doing
is you're doing sort of a mini public offering of
shares of your It used to be you couldn't do that.
The Securities Exchange Commission said, you cannot do a public
offering of equity of your project unless you qualifi at
(17:12):
a certain level and you have certain documents in place.
And it's very, very extensive to put together a public offering,
especially of a low budget indie film. There's just too
much involved. It's way too expensive. It's super extensive, lots
of legal stuff, accounting stuff, reporting stuff, all this kind
of stuff which precluded a lot of small businesses, including
(17:33):
a lot of films, from getting funded that way from
sort of the general public. So years ago, i think
it was the Obama administration changed that and said, hey,
let's open this up so that we can generate some
more activity for smaller, independent, entrepreneurial type of people to
be able to raise funds from the general public. And
(17:53):
they allowed these companies to create crowdfunding campaigns where they
could sell equity in a there's some big platforms that
basically allow you to go on and instead of donating
your money, you're investing your money. Now. To invest you
have to be what we call a qualified investor, So
(18:14):
you have to be able to demonstrate. So if you
want to make an investment on, say a movie, on
one of these platforms, then they're going to ask you
a lot of questions about who you are. They're going
to ask you basically your asset base, your net worth,
do you have the ability to lose the money because
they need to qualify you because this is in some
ways a form of gambling, right, investing is gambling. Really
(18:37):
at the end of the day, you're hoping that what
you invest in is going to generate a return on investment,
but it might not. It might lose all the money.
So the administration wants to make sure that people understand
that it's gambling, and they want to make sure that
you can afford to gamble at the level you're gambling,
meaning you can afford to lose that investment. They don't
(18:58):
want tons of people putting up their life savings and
their pension funds and all this kind of stuff to
gamble on these very super high risk investments, you know,
thinking that they're going to become millionaires, because the truth
is a extremely low percentage of these things are successful.
Most of them fail, which I hate to say, but
(19:19):
you know that's just business, all right. So the SEC says, no, Well,
let people gamble, but we have to qualify them to
make sure they can afford to gamble. I mean, they
should do this in casinos too. I don't know why
they don't, but it's too would be too onerous to
ask everybody to fill out questionnaires before they walk into
a casino. So that's what they do on these equity
crowdfunding platforms. So you have to qualify. You have to
be a qualified investor, and if you are, then you
(19:40):
can buy into an investment in a certain project. And
so there are many films that try to raise and
they don't. They don't go for five thousand or ten thousand.
They're going for three four or five hundred thousand, even
several million, all right, because there's so much work involved,
and these are bigger films and they want to get
finance at a much higher level. So I am not
(20:02):
an expert inequity crowdfunding by any means. I've looked at
the sites. I've explored them, and they're very interesting, and
I think that in some cases there's opportunities there. I
think that people like the general sort of donor base
out there is not if they're going to invest in
a film. I'm not sure they're looking at a crowdfunding
(20:24):
platform to do a significant investment. And I don't know
what the lowest number is. Maybe it's one hundred dollars
or one thousand dollars or something like that. But when
you're asking, say the likes of Uncle Charlie to maybe
invest one hundred thousand dollars, I don't think he's going
to do that on a crowdfunding platform. I think you're
gonna have to go pitch him directly and say, hey,
(20:44):
uncle Charlie, not only do I want you to put
in one hundred, I need five of your friends to
each put in a hundred. That's a different type of pitch.
That's a personal investment pitch deck that we talked about
a few episodes ago. Crowdfunding is reaching out to everybody,
people who you do I don't know and never will know.
I mean people from all around the country, around the
world for that matter, who just see your project and say, hey,
(21:07):
this looks kind of cool, looks kind of interesting. Let's
take a piece of it. See what happens. Maybe it'll
amount to something probably it won't. This is called very
high risk what we call angel investing, meaning people basically
don't expect a return. They would like it, it would
be nice, but they're going to be an angel and
give you the money anyways, just because on the odd
(21:29):
odd chance that something comes of it, they could hopefully
make a lot of money. So I don't know what
the success rate on equity crowdfunding has been. Obviously, on
reward crowdfunding has been relatively good because it's been going
on for decades now and people keep doing it, and
I guess lots of people enjoy it. I often ask
(21:50):
my students how many crowdfunding campaigns have you done? And
most people kind of put up their hand a little
bit and say, well, I sort of did one. I said,
what do you mean sort of, Well, it was a
lot of work and I kind of didn't finish it.
Did you launch it? So some people have launched it, right,
But launching it, like I say, is only half the battle.
Then you got to drive traffic to it. And then
when you do the analysis of sort of who is donating,
(22:14):
and this is back to reward crowdfunding, so donor based crowdfunding,
you kind of look at the rewards, right, and let's
say it's five thousand dollars campaign, and you see that
the top reward the executive producer. They say how many
are eligible and how many people have done it? So
maybe there are three executive producer credits each for five
(22:35):
hundred dollars, right, And you see that of the fifteen
hundred dollars or the five thousand dollars raised, fifteen hundred
of it came from three people. Well, who are those
three people? I can tell you who they are. They're
the mother of the filmmaker or the parents, right, they
are the grandparents of the filmmaker, and they're the best
(22:55):
friend of the parents of the filmmaker. Those are the
people who basically want to support you. And is it
for sure that way? No, I don't know for sure,
but I'm assuming the bigger donations come from family and friends.
The little stuff like the ten dollars stuffs free screening,
you know, there might be fifty or one hundred of
those or unlimited. Usually there's a number on it, so
one hundred of those. Those are sort of the real
(23:17):
donor base, the middle of the road stuff. It's hard
to say, but if you're going to do a crowdfunding campaign,
you've got to be prepared to work it. You've got
to be prepared to call a lot of people, reach
out on social media, do marketing to really get their attention.
So that's why I'm saying, you got to sort of
do an analysis as to whether or not the amount
of time and effort you put into it is worth
(23:39):
the return you're going to get from it. And I
can go either way on that. But like I say,
it's enormously popular crowdfunding and people are still doing it
and having a lot of fun with it because there's
unique things on crowdfunding platforms that you're not going to
find anywhere, unique films that would never see the light
of day, tons of unique inventions and all this kind
(23:59):
of stuff. So you know a lot of young people
love looking at that kind of thing, and even older
people who just are curious to see the way my
people's minds work and the kind of stuff that they're
working on. So that's crowdfunding. If I seem to be
a little negative on it, it's only because the amount
of time and effort it takes to do the campaign
has not been as rewarding as I would have liked
(24:22):
it to have been. However, there are exceptions and there
are lots of really good success stories. So check out
the three big platforms Indie Go Go, Kickstarter, Seden, Spark,
and Gain. There's other ones. People say what about GoFundMe,
and I say, yeah, go fund Me is a big one,
but not necessarily for filmmaking. It's more for personal causes
(24:43):
and things like that. So the big ones are those three.
Check them out see if it's for you, and if
it is, have fun and good luck. I encourage all
of my listeners to send me questions if they're curious
about certain topics or they want more information on things
that I've spoken about. So my email address is Jdeverrett
at Deverettmedia dot com. It will be in the show notes,
(25:06):
and feel free to send in your questions and we
will hopefully be able to get to them and expand
and give you the answers
A lot of people believe that the way to get
their film financed is through crowdfunding. I am not a
huge believer in crowdfunding for film financing, but because so
many people talk about it, I want to do an
episode on it and explain it in detail and explain
why I believe what I do. If you want to
(00:21):
be a successful indie filmmaker, you need to know a
lot about not just the production of movies, but the business.
We are going to tell you the truth and reality
of what really happens in the indie film business. Okay,
So crowdfunding is as the name says, it's basically getting
(00:44):
funding from a crowd of people. And the crowd of
people is the general public. So how do you connect
with the general public. It's not easy to do that.
Like you can stand on a street corner with a
sign trying to attract people or accosting them as their
cross the street, or doing you know that kind of thing.
It's not gonna work. You'll intimidate people. Some smart people
(01:06):
got together and said, hey, we've got another way of
connecting with the general public with a wide, wide array
of people who might be interested in looking at various
projects and they created these online platforms, which we call
crowdfunding platforms. So there are specific ones that are really
(01:26):
good for funding movies, or funding components of movies, or
primarily I'm going to say short films. But a lot
of filmmakers say to me, I'm going to raise the
money for my movie on a crowdfunding platform. And I say,
you're not going to raise seven hundred thousand dollars on
a crowdfunding platform. Okay, maybe you're going to raise five
thousand if you're doing a short film. Maybe you're going
(01:49):
to raise ten, fifteen, twenty thousand dollars. Maybe for the
development or scriptwriting or something like that of a feature.
Maybe if you're really lucky and you work super hard,
maybe you'll get fifty thousand. Now, once in a while,
somebody gets a couple hundred thousand. The odd person has
gotten over five hundred thousand, all right, But that is
(02:09):
kind of like saying, hey, I'm gonna win a lottery.
So most people don't win lotteries. Tens of millions of
people buy tickets and very few people win. So what
I'm saying to you, it's not a good business plan
or a business strategy to say my business plan is
to win the lottery. If you get lucky and you
win the lottery, wonderful, But don't make that your plan,
(02:30):
all right. That is basically crowdfunding. Don't say I'm gonna
do a crowdfunding campaign and I'm gonna get half a
million dollars. That would be like saying I'm gonna win
the lottery. The likelihood of that happening is so low.
The truth is, if you get fifty thousand dollars, you've
done really, really, really well. So don't think that you're
going to fund a full length feature film at seven
(02:52):
hundred thousand dollars through a crowdfunding campaign. Believe and understand
that you're going to maybe get the development funding or
the scriptwriting funding if at the beginning of the project,
or maybe some finishing funding or something like that. But
I'm also going to tell you it's super time consuming,
super difficult. There's a lot to know about how crowdfunding works,
so let's talk about it, all right. So crowdfunding is
(03:14):
basically you're going to do a campaign where you're going
to reach out to the general public to say, hey,
here's what I'm doing. Are you interested? Would you like
to give me some funding. There's three sort of main
platforms that people use to crowdfund for indie films. There's
other platforms, but the three main ones are Kickstarter, indie
go Go, and Seed and spark Seed and spark is
(03:37):
only for artistic projects, all right, for films and plays
and publishing and music. Right it's only for art indie
go Go and Kickstarter are for everything. Films is only
one category. They also do all kinds of inventions, all
kinds of new devices, things like you know, games, and
(03:59):
different marketing properties, all kinds of stuff. So films is
only one category on those two sites. As a matter
of fact, it's not the biggest category. Inventions are in
science and technology and biotech that type of thing, but
it's still a pretty big category. You can go on
to say indiegog, Seeden, Sparker or Kickstarter and create a
(04:21):
campaign and here's how it works, and you should check
it out. You can check out each of them. I'll
start with Kickstarter, all right, because Kickstarter is still the
biggest of the platforms, even though one could argue that
Indiegogo was bigger that I'll explain the difference in a minute.
So let's see you go on to Kickstarter and you say,
I'm going to start a campaign where I'm going to
put my film up and I'm going to ask people
(04:43):
to give me money. So the first question is how
do they give money. So on these platforms, this is
what we call reward crowdfunding, and the people give the
money as a donation. They are not investing in your movie.
They are not getting any equity in your movie. They're
not a partner with you. They are actually not even
(05:04):
expecting to get their money back. They are donating their
money to you. It is a strict one hundred percent donation.
You get the money, they give it to you, You
get to use it for your project. You don't have
to give them anything back. The reason we call it
reward crowdfunding is because generally the way these campaigns work
(05:24):
is that you give them a prize back based on
their level of donation, otherwise known as a reward a prize.
All right, So maybe at the lowest level, maybe you're
asking somebody to donate ten dollars, and in the case
of a movie, maybe you say you're going to give
them a screening link to the movie when it's finished.
That's going to be their reward that they're going to
(05:44):
get to watch the movie when it's finished. That's for
ten dollars. Maybe at twenty five dollars, maybe they get
a digital copy of the script. Maybe at fifty dollars
they get a thank you on the movie. Maybe at
one hundred dollars they get all those things, the screening copy,
the digital copy of the script, credit in the movie,
(06:05):
and then they get maybe some other type of reward.
Maybe they get to do an online meet and greet
with the director. Maybe at the next level they get
some type of true jacket or something like that. Now
I'm going to tell you it's better not to do
anything that's physical. Don't be sending clothes, don't be sending
(06:25):
physical posters, don't be sending all that kind of stuff.
It's so hard to manage that, especially when you get
into clothing. It's different sizes and styles and female versus
male and all this kind of stuff. So it's better
to do all your rewards as digital. But as the
levels go up, they generally build on each other to
get everything from the previous level plus the new thing,
(06:45):
and it could go up to I don't know, one thousand, five,
ten thousand, dollars for maybe an executive producer credit on
the movie and on IMDb, and maybe somebody is willing
to do that. So you're going to set up these
campaigns when you go online, and you're gonna see these campaigns,
and generally down the right side of the campaign is
the rewards. Here's the different levels of donation that we
(07:06):
would like you to make to our project, and here's
what we're going to give you the prize that we're
gonna give you for that donation. On the left side
of the campaign, it's going to be sort of outlining
the project that you're doing. It's going to be an overview,
a sort of a synopsis of the film you're making.
Then you're gonna talk a little bit about your team.
You're gonna maybe talk about use of your funds, like
(07:27):
when people donate, how you're going to use the funds,
and you're going to talk about just other elements of
when you're gonna shoot and the things that you require,
and just you know, potentially some of the distribution of
the genre or whatever, just things that make people interested
in the campaign. But the most important component of the
campaign is going to be the top left component, and
(07:49):
that is going to be a pitch video. So basically,
all of these campaigns, or all the good ones, have
a pitch video of talking about what the film's about,
or what they're going to use the funds for, or
why you should give them this donation. It's an art
to do the pitch video. Well, all right, Like anything else,
you're basically doing this video to ask people to give
(08:11):
you money. So I've seen hundreds of these pitch videos.
Some of them are fantastic, some of them are absolutely terrible,
depending on what you like. So remember, for the most part,
these videos are being made before the project is made,
so you don't have any footage, you haven't shot anything yet,
so you're doing this sort of outreach pitch video or
concept real to say to people, here's what I'm gonna do.
(08:33):
So oftentimes the pitch video is the producer and or
the director looking into the camera the way I'm looking
at you right now and saying, hey, everybody, this is
the project I'm making and it's going to be really cool,
and this is when we're gonna do it, and here's
what it's going to kind of look like. And it's
a talking head. And sometimes they go and they cut
(08:54):
to other footage. If they have anything that they've shot,
they'll cut to that. Sometimes they'll cut to, say, shots
from other movies that they borrowed, and we call that
a rip reel, sort of a concept reel, saying, hey,
this is what it's gonna look like, even though it's
clear it's not their movie, but they just need to
show something to explain what their movie's gonna look like.
Then maybe they'll introduce some other people on their team.
Maybe they'll introduce the actors. If they have actual footage
(09:17):
of something they've shot, depending on what they're raising the
funds for, maybe they'll introduce that as well. The videos
should be anywhere from two to three minutes long. I've
seen ten minute videos that bore the heck out of me.
They shouldn't be more than that because people don't want
to watch too much and you should be able to
get that information across pretty quickly. Now I am not
(09:38):
an expert in crowdfunding. I have done it before, I
teach it, I analyze it all the time, but frankly,
I don't love it. The reason I don't love it
is just the amount of work it takes to put
together one of these successful campaigns is often way more
than the amount that you're gonna raise, So like, I
value my time at a certain level and my effort,
(10:00):
and in some ways, making this campaign is almost harder
than making the film. Now, I know you need the money.
Like let's say you're making a short film. You need
five thousand dollars. It's almost as much, if not more
work to make the campaign to get the five thousand
then it would be to make the film. But you
need that five thousand to make the film because the
other component of raising money on a crowdfunding campaign is
(10:23):
not just creating the campaign, but it's doing outreach to
people to donate to that campaign. So even though your
film is up on a platform, say like Kickstarter, all right,
and all of the people who are on Kickstarter can
access it, it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to find
it or look for it, because there's hundreds and hundreds
of other campaigns that you're competing against, so people may
(10:47):
not see it, they may skip through it, or whatever.
They may not see it. So you have to spend
lots and lots of time on social media reaching out
to your network of friends and family and potential supporters
to let them know that you've launched a Kickstarter campaign
and that they should go on to Kickstarter to find
your campaign to donate to it. So that's also a
(11:07):
ton of work doing the social media stuff. Now I'm
not saying you shouldn't do this. I'm just saying a
lot of people say the same thing. It's just it's
a ton of work to do a really good campaign.
But you know, if it works and you get the money,
then it was worthwhile. So let's just spend a minute
and talk about sort of the differences between the platforms.
And again, these are all reward crowdfunding platforms where the
(11:27):
money's coming in as a donation, because in a minute
I'm going to talk about equity crowdfunding, which is different.
So Kickstarter is i think still the most popular. Now,
the major difference between Kickstarter and indiego Go and seed
in Spark is this is that Kickstarter is an all
or nothing campaign. You set a goal. All of these
campaigns set a goal. So you say, I want my
(11:49):
goal to be ten thousand dollars and usually these campaigns
run for sixty days. Now, normally they get most of
their funding in the first thirty days, but usually they
run them for sixty days, sometimes thirty days. I think
more and more they're doing shorter time spans because they
don't want to have to run it over two months.
They run it over one month thirty days. So let's
say you're saying in thirty days, I want to get
(12:09):
ten thousand dollars. You got to do a lot of
outreach and get a lot of people to come on
with Kickstarter. If you don't hit that ten thousand dollars level,
then you don't get anything. Even if you have donations
up to ninety seven hundred dollars, but you don't hit
your goal of ten thousand. People commit to a donation
by their credit card, but the credit card payment isn't
(12:31):
actually processed until the level is hit. Once the level
is hit on Kickstarter, then they process the credit cards
at the end of the campaign and say, okay, we
hit the level. Now we're going to give that money
to the filmmaker. If you don't hit your goal, you
get nothing, whereas on indie go go it doesn't matter
(12:52):
whether you hit your goal or not. Whatever amount you get,
they give it to you. So let's say at the
end of your thirty day campaign, you have raised half
of your goal five thousand dollars. They're going to process
the credit cards and send you the money of five
thousand dollars. You only got half your goal, you're gonna
get five thousand and on Seed and Spark, which is
primarily only for filmmaking, it's seventy five percent of your goal.
(13:16):
You have to hit seventy five percent. I believe that's
what it is. I should have checked it before. But
if you hit seventy five percent of your goal, then
you get to keep that money or anything in excess
to that. But if you don't get to seventy five
you get nothing. So it's kind of the hybrid between
Kickstarter and indiegog. So let's just look at that for
a second. Is it good or bad? Like one would say, like,
if I'm a filmmaker and I want to raise money,
(13:37):
why would I use Kickstarter when if I don't hit
my goal, I don't get anything. Wouldn't it be better
to use indiego go, where basically, no matter what I get,
I get to keep it. So remember I said, I
think Kickstarter is still the number one platform. And here's
the reason. If you're the donor, not the filmmaker, the
recipient of the funds, but the donor, somebody who's actually
(13:58):
donating the funds, wouldn't you rather give to a project
that you believe is actually going to get made at
the level that the filmmaker wants to make it. So
when a filmmaker says I need ten thousand dollars to
make my film properly, me as a donor, I'd say, yeah,
I okay, if you get ten thousand dollars and you
(14:18):
make your film properly. But if you only get five
thousand dollars, how are you gonna make a ten thousand
dollars film. So that's with Indiegogo. Basically, they say, okay,
here's the five thousand dollars, but you need a ten
to make the film. How are you going to make
a film for five thousand that you need a ten
for You're gonna have to do a heck of a
lot of compromising. But if you only get two thousand,
can you even make the film? Now you're gonna get
(14:41):
the money, it's gonna go to you, but you can't
even make the film. So a lot of donors say no, no, no,
We're willing to give if the campaign gets its goal.
Because then we know that the filmmaker actually make the
proper film, and that's what we're willing to support. But
a ton of business goes on in indigog And I'm
not saying it's a bad platform. It's a great platform.
And a lot of filmmakers say, I'd rather use any
(15:01):
googo just in case I don't hit my goal. I
want to get whatever I can, So I just say,
the challenge is, if you only get a small percentage
of the funds that you actually need to do your project,
how are you going to do the project properly? You're
going to be way too compromise, you're probably not going
to do it. And Seed and Spark is somewhere in
between that they say you could probably get your project
made it seventy five percent of your budget. You'd have
(15:22):
to compromise a few things, but we're willing to kind
of go at that level and compromise it, which one
could say is a fair compromise. So all of these
platforms are more or less similar in terms of their layouts,
in terms of the rewards that they offer, in terms
of the pitch video, the outline of the strategy, and
what the project is. Seed and Spark is a great
(15:44):
platform in terms of learning because they have tons and
tons of materials and kind of online seminars and things
like that about how to actually create a campaign, how
to promote your campaign, how to actually do crowdfunding. So
congrats to seeden Spark for putting that up. It's really
really informative. I point a lot of my students to
(16:05):
their resources if you want to learn how to do it.
Indigogs and Kickstarter have that too, but seeden Spark is
really focused on filmmaking and the arts. You should check
that out if you really want to understand how to
make a really compelling campaign that you know engages a
lot of people take the time to read it and
really understand it because they talk a lot about making
(16:28):
a proper pitch video and engaging materials and what the
project should be. That type of thing. So that is
what we call reward crowdfunding, and it's all about donations,
all right. All the funds you're getting are donations. Now,
there is another type of crowdfunding. It's called equity crowdfunding.
So equity crowdfunding is when you're asking people to invest
(16:51):
in your project. So in essence, what you're really doing
is you're doing sort of a mini public offering of
shares of your It used to be you couldn't do that.
The Securities Exchange Commission said, you cannot do a public
offering of equity of your project unless you qualifi at
(17:12):
a certain level and you have certain documents in place.
And it's very, very extensive to put together a public offering,
especially of a low budget indie film. There's just too
much involved. It's way too expensive. It's super extensive, lots
of legal stuff, accounting stuff, reporting stuff, all this kind
of stuff which precluded a lot of small businesses, including
(17:33):
a lot of films, from getting funded that way from
sort of the general public. So years ago, i think
it was the Obama administration changed that and said, hey,
let's open this up so that we can generate some
more activity for smaller, independent, entrepreneurial type of people to
be able to raise funds from the general public. And
(17:53):
they allowed these companies to create crowdfunding campaigns where they
could sell equity in a there's some big platforms that
basically allow you to go on and instead of donating
your money, you're investing your money. Now. To invest you
have to be what we call a qualified investor, So
(18:14):
you have to be able to demonstrate. So if you
want to make an investment on, say a movie, on
one of these platforms, then they're going to ask you
a lot of questions about who you are. They're going
to ask you basically your asset base, your net worth,
do you have the ability to lose the money because
they need to qualify you because this is in some
ways a form of gambling, right, investing is gambling. Really
(18:37):
at the end of the day, you're hoping that what
you invest in is going to generate a return on investment,
but it might not. It might lose all the money.
So the administration wants to make sure that people understand
that it's gambling, and they want to make sure that
you can afford to gamble at the level you're gambling,
meaning you can afford to lose that investment. They don't
(18:58):
want tons of people putting up their life savings and
their pension funds and all this kind of stuff to
gamble on these very super high risk investments, you know,
thinking that they're going to become millionaires, because the truth
is a extremely low percentage of these things are successful.
Most of them fail, which I hate to say, but
(19:19):
you know that's just business, all right. So the SEC says, no, Well,
let people gamble, but we have to qualify them to
make sure they can afford to gamble. I mean, they
should do this in casinos too. I don't know why
they don't, but it's too would be too onerous to
ask everybody to fill out questionnaires before they walk into
a casino. So that's what they do on these equity
crowdfunding platforms. So you have to qualify. You have to
be a qualified investor, and if you are, then you
(19:40):
can buy into an investment in a certain project. And
so there are many films that try to raise and
they don't. They don't go for five thousand or ten thousand.
They're going for three four or five hundred thousand, even
several million, all right, because there's so much work involved,
and these are bigger films and they want to get
finance at a much higher level. So I am not
(20:02):
an expert inequity crowdfunding by any means. I've looked at
the sites. I've explored them, and they're very interesting, and
I think that in some cases there's opportunities there. I
think that people like the general sort of donor base
out there is not if they're going to invest in
a film. I'm not sure they're looking at a crowdfunding
(20:24):
platform to do a significant investment. And I don't know
what the lowest number is. Maybe it's one hundred dollars
or one thousand dollars or something like that. But when
you're asking, say the likes of Uncle Charlie to maybe
invest one hundred thousand dollars, I don't think he's going
to do that on a crowdfunding platform. I think you're
gonna have to go pitch him directly and say, hey,
(20:44):
uncle Charlie, not only do I want you to put
in one hundred, I need five of your friends to
each put in a hundred. That's a different type of pitch.
That's a personal investment pitch deck that we talked about
a few episodes ago. Crowdfunding is reaching out to everybody,
people who you do I don't know and never will know.
I mean people from all around the country, around the
world for that matter, who just see your project and say, hey,
(21:07):
this looks kind of cool, looks kind of interesting. Let's
take a piece of it. See what happens. Maybe it'll
amount to something probably it won't. This is called very
high risk what we call angel investing, meaning people basically
don't expect a return. They would like it, it would
be nice, but they're going to be an angel and
give you the money anyways, just because on the odd
(21:29):
odd chance that something comes of it, they could hopefully
make a lot of money. So I don't know what
the success rate on equity crowdfunding has been. Obviously, on
reward crowdfunding has been relatively good because it's been going
on for decades now and people keep doing it, and
I guess lots of people enjoy it. I often ask
(21:50):
my students how many crowdfunding campaigns have you done? And
most people kind of put up their hand a little
bit and say, well, I sort of did one. I said,
what do you mean sort of, Well, it was a
lot of work and I kind of didn't finish it.
Did you launch it? So some people have launched it, right,
But launching it, like I say, is only half the battle.
Then you got to drive traffic to it. And then
when you do the analysis of sort of who is donating,
(22:14):
and this is back to reward crowdfunding, so donor based crowdfunding,
you kind of look at the rewards, right, and let's
say it's five thousand dollars campaign, and you see that
the top reward the executive producer. They say how many
are eligible and how many people have done it? So
maybe there are three executive producer credits each for five
(22:35):
hundred dollars, right, And you see that of the fifteen
hundred dollars or the five thousand dollars raised, fifteen hundred
of it came from three people. Well, who are those
three people? I can tell you who they are. They're
the mother of the filmmaker or the parents, right, they
are the grandparents of the filmmaker, and they're the best
(22:55):
friend of the parents of the filmmaker. Those are the
people who basically want to support you. And is it
for sure that way? No, I don't know for sure,
but I'm assuming the bigger donations come from family and friends.
The little stuff like the ten dollars stuffs free screening,
you know, there might be fifty or one hundred of
those or unlimited. Usually there's a number on it, so
one hundred of those. Those are sort of the real
(23:17):
donor base, the middle of the road stuff. It's hard
to say, but if you're going to do a crowdfunding campaign,
you've got to be prepared to work it. You've got
to be prepared to call a lot of people, reach
out on social media, do marketing to really get their attention.
So that's why I'm saying, you got to sort of
do an analysis as to whether or not the amount
of time and effort you put into it is worth
(23:39):
the return you're going to get from it. And I
can go either way on that. But like I say,
it's enormously popular crowdfunding and people are still doing it
and having a lot of fun with it because there's
unique things on crowdfunding platforms that you're not going to
find anywhere, unique films that would never see the light
of day, tons of unique inventions and all this kind
(23:59):
of stuff. So you know a lot of young people
love looking at that kind of thing, and even older
people who just are curious to see the way my
people's minds work and the kind of stuff that they're
working on. So that's crowdfunding. If I seem to be
a little negative on it, it's only because the amount
of time and effort it takes to do the campaign
has not been as rewarding as I would have liked
(24:22):
it to have been. However, there are exceptions and there
are lots of really good success stories. So check out
the three big platforms Indie Go Go, Kickstarter, Seden, Spark,
and Gain. There's other ones. People say what about GoFundMe,
and I say, yeah, go fund Me is a big one,
but not necessarily for filmmaking. It's more for personal causes
(24:43):
and things like that. So the big ones are those three.
Check them out see if it's for you, and if
it is, have fun and good luck. I encourage all
of my listeners to send me questions if they're curious
about certain topics or they want more information on things
that I've spoken about. So my email address is Jdeverrett
at Deverettmedia dot com. It will be in the show notes,
(25:06):
and feel free to send in your questions and we
will hopefully be able to get to them and expand
and give you the answers
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