Dan Ilic’s A Rational Fear reaches $50k crowd-funding goal
Comedian Dan Illic has reached his crowd-funding goal of $50,000 to transform his ABC Radio National show A Rational Fear into a digital comedy hub, hitting the target before the end of the campaign.
Ilic, and the A Rational Fear team, set its Pozible campaign target at $50,000 to cover the production costs to create a 10 week season of digital satire, including infographics, articles and videos.
“We try and put facts in our comedy, we try and educate and entertain. We want to get a laugh out of you but we also want to try and make sure it’s all backed up with information. We’re almost journalists if you like, in one respect you could call us investigative humorists,” said Ilic.
The team hit their target on Tuesday and have since made an extra $2,495, with the funding round closing at midnight tonight.
“We are extremely privileged to siphon off our friends’ money,” he quipped.
The campaign has seen over 700 people contribute, with supporters ranging from author Cassandra Wilkinson, comedian Will Anderson, GetUp communications director Matt Levinson, comedian Catherine Deveny, radio host Tim Ross, writer/creator of web-series Plonked Tim Earl, TV host Andrew O’Keefe, entrepreneur Dick Smith and The Checkout’s Kirsten Drysdale.
Ilic said: “Seeing all the supporters and the money they’ve given us, and the calibre of people who’ve given us money, it’s like now we have to deliver.
He joked: “The pressure is on to deliver and I can assure everybody that we will let you down.
“The amount of community support from other comedians has been extraordinary, after all this is something they benefit from as well. It’s been nice to get lots of support from social media and money as well, a lot of comedians have donated a lot of money to this project.
“The cool thing about that is we’re building a platform so we can give money back to comedians. For every bit of content you see over the last three weeks we paid money for it, particularly if it came from outside contributors. We do have a few people on full-time, we want contributions from outside and we want to pay for them and pay a proper rate.”
A Rational Fear has been producing content since it kicked off the Pozible campaign, hiring five full-time writers for four days a week.
“The whole project is going to cost a lot more than what the target is, anything we don’t pay for ourselves will be paid for out of the Pozible campaign,” explained Ilic.
“To hire 5 people 4 days a week for 10 weeks straight is an expensive idea and the Pozible funds offset some of the costs of that.
To date the content has been shared on A Rational Fear’s tumblr page and on Facebook.
“We’re trying to get our proper platform up by the end of this week or next week. At the moment the Tumblr is good, it’s had lots of shares,” said Ilic.
On the future of A Rational Fear at the conclusion of the 10 weeks, Ilic is hopeful it can be something that continues, but admitted his is unsure of the brand’s direction.
He added: “It’s a very expensive project, if people are into it and we build a big enough community behind us maybe it’s something we can do. It’s hard to know where the brand is going, there’s a lot of excitement around the brand and where it’s going so there might be another party who wants to take the brand into a larger space.
“We’re trying to figure that out at the moment, at the end of this eight weeks we’ll figure out if we want something more tangible on television or a more changeable publishing platform that we can do year in year out.”
Miranda Ward
Linkedin
Well done Dan and your team.
A talented comedian who I’ve had the pleasure of working with in the past. These funds are very well deserved an cant wait to enjoy my next 10 weeks of content.
It anyone at Screen Australia had a brain they would be seeking out people like Dan to support, rather than continute to throw endless money at the expert paper pushers who keep bedazzling Australia with lousy content.
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Thanks Mum… you didn’t have to spray Screen Australia, they make wonderful things.
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