Imperturbability Perturbed

Usually Julie and I are pretty cool cucumbers. We’re marathon multi-taskers, historically hard workers, and revved up risk takers ready to try new things and forge new paths. However, if you want to see Julie or I break out into a cold sweat or start crying for no reason, come to our house this week and ask how our TILTtheKickstarter campaign is going. The reality is that it’s going pretty well (we’re at 50 backers and almost $2000 after 1 week), but we’re antsy – all goose bumps and capillary explosions.

Why so dramatic? Mostly because we love hyperbole, but also because balancing our creative drives with the more practical aspects of a fundraising campaign is stressful.  We are currently putting the finishing touches on the Tilt script, finishing the last shorts that will serve as precursors to the film, and reworking drafts of other unrelated (but no less important) projects.  Further, we’re busy creating all of the TILTtheTown biographies for our backers. Because we do everything we do all the way (no half-assed efforts here), the bios are taking up a lot of our time and energy.  And, perhaps, our sanity.

Do I Still Look Pretty?

You see, the whole idea of asking for money is tricky. No one really wants to do it.  It’s not fun, and it feels weird.  We’ve been going to our filmmaker friends for advice on dealing with CFSS (CrowdFunding Stress Syndrome):

• Gary King on crowdfunding for “How Do You Write a Joel Schermann Song”: “Lessons Learned in the Land of Crowdfunding”
• Gregory Bayne on crowdfunding for  “Jens Pulver: Driven”: “The Crowd”
• Marinell Montales on crowdfunding for “CERISE” with John T. Trigonis: “Q-Tip: Quick Tip for Indie Filmmakers: Crowdfunding”

One of our favorite bits of advice came from Dennis Peters, who’s currently raising money for his film “I’m Not Adam”: Don’t take it personally; try to see it as a game.

Putting the F-U-N in crowdfunding. For ourselves, as well as our friends and backers, Julie and I decided to make this whole crowdfunding thing-a-ma-jig as fun as possible.  I’d been toying with TILTtheTown for some time before I decided it would be a great crowd-sourcing experiment .  At first I just imagined that it would be a place where people could wander about learning pertinent information about the film, from character bios to plot points to important Brainerd landmarks.  Eventually, though, it morphed into something much bigger, something interactive, and something exciting . Hence, TILTtheTown.

Immediate satisfaction. Even if (when) we reach our funding goal for TILT, the movie won’t be finished for a while. With TILTtheTown, however, we can give our backers an immediate and personalized shout out for their generous contributions.  Further, our TILTtheTown map is an ongoing, ever-evolving living document.  With each new backer comes a new story, new interactions, new connections, and, hopefully, new friendships amongst our backers.  What I hadn’t anticipated is how time-consuming it would be to create this world, nor how fun.  If Julie and I had our way, all we would do is create fake biographies of people we barely know (but are getting to know better). If only we could find a permanent gig like this…

So what’s out plan? Back to work! Writing the TILTtheTown bios is fun and important, but we can’t spend all day everyday doing it any more than we can spend all day reworking the script or eating ice cream or hanging out with friends.  It’s all about balance. Hence, this morning we’ll do a little bit of this; this afternoon, a little bit about that. And, slowly but surely, we’ll get everything finished. Hopefully without any more haircut contingency plan disasters…

Oh yeah, if you want to see how the haircut contingency plan disaster came about, you’ll have to check out our Kickstarter video:

This entry was posted on Monday, June 28th, 2010 at 10:54 am. It is filed under FILM and tagged with crowd-funding, Kickstarter, stress management, Tilt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.