Immortality. Fame. There is a difference.
THE PROJECT
Our team is seeking your support to make the pilot episode for our digital series, The Musicianer, an Americana music-driven narrative project with a supernatural bent, starring the roots music phenom, Petunia of the British Columbia-based band, Petunia & The Vipers.
The Musicianer tells the story of a memory-challenged busker who is trying to come to grips with a growing, alarming realization about his life. He is aided in his quest to learn about his past by a musicologist who puts her knowledge and training to work on his problem.
The series will feature original compositions by Petunia whose songwriting is as celebrated as his singing. These will be written in ways that span the styles of 20th century popular music as our characters move about in time, unraveling the mystery of The Musicianer.
THE STRATEGY
In the last decade or so, in the face of enormous technological change, the media landscape for independent filmmakers has been greatly disrupted in both bad and good ways.
The bad ways include the dwindling or outright disappearance of funding that once existed in the form of distribution advances, significant co-production dollars, grants and foundation money.
The good ways include the wide variety of new distribution platforms that makes broadcast and theatrical presentations of film only two of the opportunities to reach wide audiences with new film projects. Another boon these days is the advent of crowd funding (like Kickstarter) to raise production money and build audience!
As we look at this landscape, it’s become clearer that audiences are embracing serial programs wholeheartedly – wherever they are. While there are still pretty significant costs associated with producing a series, a lot of anecdotal evidence suggests that a filmmaker can make and shop a pilot episode as a path to full production. For example, this year several filmmakers at SXSW got traction on new projects by screening pilots at the festival. That’s exciting.
So that’s our mission: To make a very high-quality pilot that will tantalize decision-makers who can help us fund a longer, limited series.
With this campaign we are requesting about half the money we would need to complete the pilot – $39,000. We will use this money in June to do the first two of our five shoot days. This shoot is the most expensive part of our production as it involves 1920s costuming, an early “talking picture era” train station set, and period-accurate props, as well as the tremendously important fees for staff, cast, crew, equipment and insurance.
[NOTE: Kickstarter, as you probably know, is an all-or-nothing proposition. If we don’t reach our goal, we get nothing and your credit card is not billed. So there’s a fair amount of “excitement” – read: mild anxiety – associated with this process!]
Of course if we are lucky enough to meet our goal with your help, we will also have a stretch goal of an additional $36,000. That money would allow us to shoot the additional three days in October of 2017 without needing to do a second phase of fundraising.
But first things first.
Please help us fund The Musicianer!
Thank you for your consideration!
The risk we are running is that we will only raise enough money for the first shoot (or no shoots) and so only get half of the project done (or none).
But based on our past two successful Kickstarter experiences – our last music film, The Winding Stream, was partly funded by two separate goal-surpassing Kickstarters – I feel confident that minimally we will be able to reach our goal this time and use what we shoot to help continue to fundraise later if need be.
I also feel that the success The Winding Stream enjoyed out in the world – a SXSW premiere, 30 festival screenings around the world, numerous festival awards, an 80-city North American art house tour and distribution through Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, Google+ and many other digital and DVD platforms will help translate into support for this series.