Crowdfunding 201: Capturing An ‘Impasse’

Ok class, for our next lesson, we’re going to take a look at a campaign for a short film. The campaign itself has made a couple of pretty big mistakes, but just like we did last week, we’re going to look at one specific aspect of the campaign that’s working.

IMPASSE by Michael Bekemeyer & Jeanne Bowerman

People who make movies spend a lot of time talking about existing properties. You hear this a lot in Hollywood circles, of course, as the studios will seemingly adapt anything, no matter how much the jump to the big screen stretches the limits of plausibility (Battleship? Really?). But there’s a reason for that: you’ve heard of Battleship. You’ve played Battleship. It’s easier to talk John Q. Public into seeing a film if they already know something about it. This is not complicated and I can’t imagine I’m telling you something you don’t already know.

But where you don’t see a lot of existing properties is in low budget independent film. Sure, every so often you get a film like Matthew Lillard’s Fat Kid Rules The World that adapts a book with an existing audience, but most of the time you’re dealing with entirely new stories that need to more or less start from scratch.

Enter Jeanne Bowerman, a screenwriter who’s career is pretty much defined by Twitter. Along with a couple of others, she started the weekly #scriptchat discussion and has diligently built a reputation as one of the more generous people in the Twitter film community.

Most of the time, she works out of a Panera office, but a little over a year ago, she shifted to a Starbucks and became transfixed by an argument a couple was having in the parking lot. This being Jeanne, she started live tweeting it. You can read the entirety of it here (they released it at the $4,000 mark), but I pulled a few of the tweets below:

He lowers his hood and looks at her. He looks vulnerable. She said something… and his hood went back up

— Jeanne V Bowerman (@jeannevb) February 5, 2011

They must really love each other to have such an artful argument

— Jeanne V Bowerman (@jeannevb) February 5, 2011

I shld feel guilty about invading their privacy, but u guys are mostly writers. Thought you’d enjoy this slice of reality for char research

— Jeanne V Bowerman (@jeannevb) February 5, 2011

Still silent. An impasse. Who will budge first.

— Jeanne V Bowerman (@jeannevb) February 5, 2011

This went on for quite a while, and before long, Jeanne had her followers transfixed by the scene that was unfolding before them, in real time. People were talking about it. A lot. According to Jeanne, the number was in the hundreds. I was online for the whole thing and I remember it pretty vividly even now. So when the campaign for Impasse launched, it took all of 5 minutes to realize it was the adaptation of that story. She had, out of thin air and a little bit of voyeurism, created for herself an existing property. But more importantly, it was a valuable property. One she could leverage into a short film. Crowdfunding it was a no-brainer.

To quote Jeanne, who I reached via email:

The plan was always to crowdfund. To be completely honest, I have very little experience with crowdfunding, so this is all quite surreal to me. I’ve helped many an indie filmmaker raise money… I do love to pimp indie… but I have not run my own campaign before. In hindsight, I can already see where I’ve made mistakes, mostly in pre-planning. I just started my full-time job as ScriptMag.com’s editor only weeks before we launched, and I’ve been swamped getting past the learning curve of both the new job and running a Kickstarter campaign. Some days I can only pop into social media for quick spurts, but I’m trying not to inundate with self-promotion. In an ideal world, I’d have time to still organically engage in between calls for support.

But overall, we’re learning as we go, and people are unbelievably generous and kind. Today we posted the original tweets from that day at the coffeehouse, and the response has been incredible. We contemplated posting the actual Impasse script, but in many ways, this is even better. People will understand the tone of the film and the emotion it will evoke just by reading the tweets, yet it allows us to keep the story a surprise. It’s already exciting our backers. We’re thrilled with the response.

She built an audience for her project, and now she’s leveraging that audience to bring the film into fruition. And that’s what crowdfunding is all about.

Extra Credit:

Last week’s project, Brea Grant’s Best Friends Forever, cruised past the $75,000 goal on Saturday en route to over $80K….Going down the meta rabbit hole is this documentary about crowdfunding which naturally has a Kickstarter campaign. As for the campaign, it’s not great. Timon Birkhofer, if you’re reading this, come interview me and we’ll do a scene for the doc where I tear down your campaign and re-build it…If you missed it earlier in the week, there’s a really interesting article about a campaign that is trying to fix a campaign that made a lot of mistakes in trying to duplicate Double Fine’s success. Three weeks of pre-production for any campaign is really low…See something interesting in the works? Let me know on Twitter.

Lucas McNelly is the filmmaker behind A Year Without Rent, Up Country, Blanc De Blanc, and Gravida. He runs Kickstarter campaigns for a living. He hasn’t lived anywhere in a long time.