[Kickstarter] Better Things: The Life and Choices of Jeffrey Catherine Jones
polycounter lvl 18
Fundraiser page: http://www.indiegogo.com/BetterThings
Trailer: http://vimeo.com/57112726
Not sure how much interest there is on here for documentaries about traditional artists, but I'll just put this up here. As far as I can tell, it's Jeff Jones' story told through conversations with his peers over the years...Rick Berry, Neil Gaiman, Paul Pope, Dave McKean, Moebius, Mike Mignola, Rebecca Guay... to name a few.
The film's done and basically just needs funding to repay production costs and take care of distribution, so there's nothing to lose by backing it. The swag tiers are kind of weak imo, but it would be a shame if this film didn't see the light of day.
Trailer: http://vimeo.com/57112726
Not sure how much interest there is on here for documentaries about traditional artists, but I'll just put this up here. As far as I can tell, it's Jeff Jones' story told through conversations with his peers over the years...Rick Berry, Neil Gaiman, Paul Pope, Dave McKean, Moebius, Mike Mignola, Rebecca Guay... to name a few.
The film's done and basically just needs funding to repay production costs and take care of distribution, so there's nothing to lose by backing it. The swag tiers are kind of weak imo, but it would be a shame if this film didn't see the light of day.
Replies
EDIT
On another note distribution on a film like this is hard, a very niche market, it would be interesting to see what kind of deal they are trying to get.
Biopics themselves have limited interest from the public and ones about artists even less so.
Distributors are a bunch of dicks and cunts.. seriously.. criteria they use for selection on what to distribute is disgraceful, they bemoan the demise of thier business because of the internet and wonder why.
Distribution wise...this film's definitely niche. I don't think they're shooting for mainstream distribution though, maybe festival circulation and smaller theaters to start with. ZacD's right though, digital distribution would've been the way to go. And all tiers should come with a copy of the video!
Kinda sad this needs help to cross the line.. I wonder if they tried to get distribution before they made it, they must have and I bet the response was poor.
They are only struggling because theres no mainstream big name celeb being interviewed..
They shouldnt actually bother with a small theatrical release, its very expensive to do, and a great excuse for the distributor to pay them fuck all even if there is a moderate amount of sucess..
straight to DVD is the best route and electronic after a couple of years
http://www.indiegogo.com/BetterThings?c=gallery
A lot of the time it's artists who are considered greats of our time not talking about Jeff Jones but about their stances on art in general.
This is the problem with crowdfunding today. People are just using it as a new means of acquiring and consuming a product and treating it as a preorder - which is just damaging to the whole point of crowdfunding.
It's $40 because you're investing into a product. You can't just sell things, you need capital to actually develop with too.
I'd be fine investing $1000 in a game I believe in if I get a cut of the profit. With kickstarter funders are taking a lot of risk and waiting a lot of time, for a little perk. I guess you can say that they made the product happen and it wouldn't exist otherwise. But as a content creator I'd still like to reward people that helped make a dream happen.
I already responded to that
It's more of a thank you than anything and makes you feel respected and valued as an investor.
The problem is that you're talking it up as profit, but there is no profit until a product sees the end of development and makes it to shelves. Those margins are not profit margins, they are the margins that fund the project. Without them, a project that needs crowdfunding simply cannot survive. This is the intent behind crowdfunds.
Projects without these kinds of margins are usually just there to abuse the system because it generates more publicity and offers presale options. Some of the non-videogame ones I've encountered have been in some cases, outright scams (and they've been funded).
In an ideal situation, people need to be more selective about what they fund and developers need to start asking whether they actually need to use a crowdfund or whether they are just profiteering on a current trend.
Crowdfunding should not be viewed as a presale, because it isn't -and if it is it's abuse of the system.
WHARGARBL
So what is it then? People who just have too much money and want to get rid of it?
If you're paying for something, you should get something back. That your reward is that the project gets made is cute, but it's not really anything substantial. It basically means that you paid $X and your reward is to be able to spend $X+Y dollars later. So in essence you'd be worse off than someone who doesn't participate and just waits to buy it when it releases. This doesn't make any sense.
The original intention behind crowd funding is to enable a creator to pitch a project that would otherwise not see the light of day. The funds are intended to develop the project to a releasable standard. If a potential backer is passionate about the product, then they will back it, justifying the crowd fund. An excellent example of this is Iron Sky, where many people donated considerable sums of moeny because they were passionate about the promised end product.
This is why the result usually offers the backer a copy of the product at a suitable minimum bid, but the system still allows a backer to donate/invest more into the scheme. You don't get nothing, you usually get the product you backed, because this is common sense. In any case, the person who just waits to buy it will lose out if the project is never funded at all.
The aforementioned original intention is being subverted by people coming to sites like Kickstarter with a finished product. Your attitude that you must be intrinsically compensated for your investment is easily exploited; you're offered the ability to back a product and there are plenty of rewards offered at increasingly great tiers. The reality is that the developer doesn't need your investment and that any additional cash you throw into those tier rewards (or through generosity) is simply being pocketed.
I don't have a great case study to hand, but this is a reasonable one (I suspect unintentionally rather than through outright greed) - Chivalry:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1711512107/chivalry-medieval-warfare?ref=category
My intention isn't to pick on them, but instead to highlight the trend.
The fund finished in mid-September and raised some $80,000 with an average backing of $45 - so let's look at the $50 tier as an example.
$50 gets you beta access, 'exclusive media reveals', a digital copy of the game and a digital copy of the soundtrack. Given that the game launched three weeks after the kickstarter fund, there can't have been much of a beta - the game was already in a finished state. Exclusive media reveals is what - a few screenshots or a youtube video sent out to you via e-mail or a similar distribution channel. The soundtrack is nice, but really only costs a little bandwidth assuming it isn't hosted for free.
So the average backer paid $50 for a game that retailed at $25, and the associated extra perks. The perks cost the developer almost nothing to deliver. The game released three weeks later, so where was the value of that cash going? It didn't pay for development and it didn't pay for the perks - the backer got played and the cash when straight into pockets. It's funny, because if you paid double the retail price of an AAA title for a special edition, and didn't get anything of value, you'd complain.
The point is, is that the presale was unnecessary. Chivalry used it as an advertising platform and fair play to them, because people will actually use it. The other point is they generated more profits than they otherwise would have done through selling the game to those 2000 people outright - which is hilarious because most of them came in with your X+Y attitude, and realistically came out of it with X-Y instead. They lost out and didn't even realise it because they were too concerned about getting the apparent rewards, which held no real value.
Most of the physical products (I'd include movies) on kickstarter are fully realized and just need investment in order to get reasonably priced products out to consumers without having to get traditional investors or taking out loans. If its a gadget, there's a fully working prototype, but they can't mass produce them without "presales". With this movie it's already done and in film festivals, they just need to repay crew and editors, and money to get the dvd's made. There's also the CreatureBox: THE MONSTER VOLUME book that's a good example of having an almost finished product but they don't have a way to get it to consumers without a "presale"
What Chivalry pulled was shitty because they didn't need funding to finish a product and didn't need money to help deliver it to consumers.
No; treating Kickstarter as a presale platform is the issue and backing purely for the return is - because that's what encourages this:
This is my point. People need to be more selective and realise that this is supposed to be an investment platform, not a pre-order store.