I’ve been making up stories ever since I can remember. I use film, video and a variety of writing outlets to express my creativity.
After making a few short films (some of them won awards at film festivals, some were watchable and some were simply made for practice, to put it mildly, ‘cos no one ever should see them) and touring film festivals with them, I felt ready to direct and produce my first feature film.
At that time, I had a few feature film scripts on the go, and as every first-time director is told, I tried to go through all the official channels to get funded.
In Europe, it means talking to your local film funding agencies, national and regional film boards and approaching the Media Desk, which is the European Union film and media funding body. That, combined with an unsuccessful search for private investors, left me drained and depressed.
In reality, nobody was seriously interested either in my films or script ideas. This is nothing personal since nobody gives a dead rat’s ass about someone else’s movie.
The whole experience of constant rejection mixed with hope was pretty discouraging. I bet a lot of you feel, or have felt, this way when trying to navigate your way through the film funding landscape while battling constant rejections, which we all know is hard to accept.
The truth is that finding money for a film is a nightmare, regardless of whether you are an independent filmmaker or a well-known, established name. It’s easier for those guys to get meetings but not easy to get the green light considering they usually ask for much more than the indie crowd.
I was in limbo for quite a long time, not knowing what to do and where to go until one day I stumbled upon a crowdfunding website, which after a further investigation got me really hopeful and excited once again.
I’m a doer so, following a bit of research, I decided to try my hand in crowdfunding.
As with most things in life, it turned out that running a campaign wasn’t as easy and straightforward as I had imagined. I ran my first campaign in 2009/2010. Back then, there was almost no information about crowdfunding — on how to run/create a successful campaign as it was all still relatively new. To this day, I have run 3 IndieGoGo campaigns. One was extremely successful (114% of the funds fundraised), another one was a-ok but not mind-blowing (29% of the funds), and one was unsuccessful = learning curve. (0%)