It’s Wednesday, October 4, which means two days have gone by since I launched the first crowdfunding campaign for Murdered on the Fourth of July and I have not posted a single thing about it here on my own personal website. Admittedly, I am terrible at updating this website (which no one really sees anyway). I actually just went through and updated several outdated pages as well as replaced the nearly 10-year-old photo of me on the homepage with … a three-year-old photo.
It’s not like I haven’t been heavily promoting the campaign elsewhere. Social media, both personal and PKWY Media official, plus emails and newsletters and all the usual things. While it all looks smooth (I think?) from the outside, I have to admit I was anxious about launching this campaign. I had really hoped to be able to fundraise for this documentary without having to do a crowdfunding deal — I’ve spent more than a year applying for grants and co-production help, and nothing has quite panned out yet (still have some apps pending). This isn’t exactly a warm, fuzzy topic that I could do a lot of fun things to help build hype and reward backers.
But so far, the support from the community has been very encouraging. People trust that I can do this project justice, and they’ve put either their words or their money toward proving that, and for that, I am grateful. We’re two days into the campaign at (as of this writing) 29% funded, which is a very good place to be (Seed&Spark, the platform we’re using, notes that campaigns who reach 30% in the first week have the best chance of meeting their goal). But we still have $8,400 to go, so definitely not counting any chickens yet.
As noted on the campaign page, the $12,000 we’re trying to raise is just a fraction of the projected budget for the entire film. Unlike Parkway of Broken Dreams, I’m not one-man-banding this film. I have a co-producer helping creatively and logistically. I have a cinematographer on contract. I have plans for this to be a film that far surpasses my last one in terms of quality, appeal, and hopefully, distribution (not that Parkway was a slouch by any means, but it wasn’t exactly debuting on HBO or Netflix).
But if this campaign is successful, it will not only pay for enough filming to get the project to a place where we can have a strong enough sample edited for potential funders, but also build up enough awareness and excitement for the film that we can prove we have the audience and demand that distributors want to see. And then I can get back to spending my time making the film, at least for a little while, instead of trying to fundraise for it–which as any filmmaker will tell you, is not the reason we got into this vocation.