Last night at 10:30pm the fundraising campaign for Flood Tide on kickstarter.com ended. We exceeded our goal of $10,000.
Fundraising can be tedious and boring. It would be much more exciting to write here about the collaborative process of DIY filmmaking, about living and shooting a film aboard junk rafts, about pretty much about anything. But, unfortunately, unless you’re very independently wealthy, you can’t make a movie without fundraising.
Flood Tide was funded primarily by grants, fellowships, credit cards and by the staggering generosity of friends and collaborators who contributed their skills, energy and vision to this project. But, at the end of the day, we still needed more money to finish it. Kickstarter was a way for us to do this, and it was a way that didn’t feel totally gross. Because, well, sometimes, having to “sell” your art feels gross.
Running this Kickstarter campaign for the last 90 days was actually fun. It was a lot of work too. But, it was nice corresponding with donors, reading their comments on the site and sharing with them pieces of the film’s process through blog updates that included outtakes from the film, live music tracks and raft-project related footage.
Every time we received an automated ‘donor-alert’ email from kickstarter it was like unwrapping a gift– and it really didn’t matter if it were $5 or $500. It was the thrill of reading an unfamiliar (or familiar!) name of a person who decided to take two minutes out of their day to kick in some money to a project they felt was worth supporting.
In the end, we were completely floored by the number of people who pledged to support Flood Tide. We feel so thankful to the communities that are connected to the film for getting behind this fundraising effort, for spreading the word and for donating themselves, often times when strapped for cash. And we’re also thankful to (and surprised by) the large number of complete strangers who gave to the campaign. In the next few weeks we’ll start sending out the donor rewards.
At times it’s felt strange to raise money for a weird art film in the midst of oil spills and endless wars and so much other local and global injustice. But our friends and collaborators have always reminded us that it’s important to make space for art and music, to make space for the imagination and the sense of possibility that art can inspire. We hope that in some small way Flood Tide will inspire a sense of possibility and energize people to build their own worlds in everyday, simple and practical ways as well as in ways that are ridiculous and impossibly grandiose.
Thanks.
