Crowdfunding Zombies

Some time ago, I met with a producer who was raising money for his zombie movie online. He was allowing people to buy "producer packages" in exchange for a financial contribution to the film, and these packages could also be given as presents.


You can check out his project Invasion of the Not Quite Dead here. He also offers contributors the chance to be a zombie extra in the movie.


Meeting AD Lane got us producers thinking. Does crowdfunding really work? If anything, it seems suited to a small budget.


So once our scripts are developed, we're going to do some research and give it a shot.

"Know your Voice" (5 of 5)

The last person I met at the NPA Pitch & Connect event was a producer/screenwriter who had written Endgame (2009) and owns a London production company.

This guy was really cool, obviously had a very collaborative approach to filmmaking and genuinely tried to be helpful. He preached more than listened, but it was inspiring nevertheless.

• "3 to 5 million is a nightmare at the moment"
• "know your own voice as a creative person"
• "a lot of British stories are too culture specific and pessimistic"
• your film's uniqueness is both its strength and its weakness, something unique may be too much of a risk for investors/distributors, but something the same won't work either, so you need to strike a careful balance
• torn between safety and risk of the new
• film audiences are different from any other kind of audiences. they are going out on a cold night and they expect to be engaged, so you can challenge them more. there is a higher level of interactive participation.
• people in the UK do not spend near enough time or money on development
• full time survival in the industry is the first goalpost to achieve
• a lot of the people in the industry have business degrees and are business people first, so that's the language you have to learn to speak
• always up-sell your product! He reckoned we should call our film a "1 million" budget
• it's a game, so play the game
• expectation building worked for Twilight, so he thinks it could work for us
• make sure you know what the next project in line is
• once we release our movie online, there will still be a lot of people who won't know it's online, so he thinks there will still be appeal for sales agents and building the film's profile by essentially giving easy access to it all over the world may be exactly what we need, especially since our primary goal is a career goal and not a financial one

Online Distribution (4 of 5)

The fourth producer of features I met at the NPA Pitch & Connect event did not introduce himself.

This guy was finding ways to shoot everyone around him down, so it was fun to bash heads for a while. I ran him through everything in detail and he ended up saying "well, you're doing everything right", which was encouraging.

• your paperwork has to be airtight to sell to distributors/agents etc
• keep it one location for a microbudget
• private investment is the way to go, sell units
• think of how you want to structure the recoupment schedule, eg. perhaps some talent first?
• he reckons deferred payments on the Mars movie will be around 350k, so 450k budget in the end (without marketing)
• he wasn't sure about online distribution, said no one has done it with success, but it's innovative and might work
• online revenue is only 2% of a blockbuster's return
• might cause problems with sales agents as there is no distributor set up that can handle global distribution (aside from maybe Sony Classics, Fox Searchlight, Paramount) , so we would have to exclude download & internet from our deal if we'd already done that ourselves and that might make our product less attractive to sales agents
• the "first online movie event" could be our sales angle?
• if we're doing this project just to get our careers off the ground then maybe we should be okay if it just gets seen everywhere and is hailed as an innovative distribution method and we don't make that much money
• we should consider having an experienced co-producer onboard