Fundraising

I hate asking people for money.

As a filmmaker, you’re constantly in a state of selling – whether it’s pitching a movie idea, or talking to investors, or showing your movie to distributors – every step of the way, you’re trying to convince someone else to give you money.

And why? Because filmmaking is, bar none, the most expensive artistic medium there is. It’s pretty cheap to paint a picture, or write a novel, or even sing a song these days. But making a film? Even as inexpensive as the technology has gotten, it still takes real dough.

Take the process of applying to film festivals. Not only do you have to buy and print DVDS (we got ours for around a buck apiece – killer deal), you have to get envelopes, mail them to faraway places, and cough up the festival entry fees. Which routinely run between $40 and $100. We just sent the movie to Berlin, and their entry fee is 125 Euros, or $185 American. Literally, we’re spending more on applying to festivals than it cost us to feed our crew for 17 days of shooting!

Still, it’s an important thing to do. Screening at a high-profile festival is our single best chance of getting distributors to see the film. And that will hopefully lead to getting a distribution deal, which is our main chance of paying back our investors and the crew people who awesomely deferred their salaries (pretty much everyone).

So we have to ask people for money. Since we don’t know any millionaires personally, that leads to us begging our friends and family. Which, during the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, makes me a tad guilty to say the least.

To make the whole process more palatable, we decided to a hold a fundraiser screening. All our friends have been asking all year to see the movie, so why not charge $10, raffle off some items, and let them take a look all at once?

We found a club called Busby’s East that rents out its ballroom and video projector (for free!), sent out the Evite to 300 or so people, and gathered some film-related items to raffle off. And on Sunday, October 25, we unspooled (or un-video projected) the current cut for a crowd of 73 people.

And it went pretty great. Being in a bar, the lights weren’t all the way down and the ice machine sounded like an Imperial Walker, but that kind of added to the whole “work in progress” feel. But people still managed to get into the movie, laughing at the jokes, jumping at the scary parts, and keeping up with the story. Even the bartender liked it – she told me she’s worked a lot of screenings in that room, and ours was one of the best she’s seen.

All told, we raised about $1300. And some donations are still trickling in. It’s not enough to cover all our upcoming post costs, but it will certainly help us get the movie to festivals. Just goes to show that even if you don’t like asking people for money, there are ways to do that make it more comfortable for everyone. Thanks again to all our friends and family members who donated!

(And if you’d still like to kick us some dough, there’s a Paypal button on our website: fuguethefilm.com.)