Audience can be a producer in your project: Broderick
US consultant Peter Broderick told the SPAA Fringe audience that audiences are no longer passive recipients, and can instead work as ‘producers’ in a project.
“There’s a lot of ways your core supporters can be helpful to your project,” said Broderick.
Contributions – and rewards – come in all sizes. For example, the Spanish sci-fi project El Cosmonauta has 2168 ‘producers’ so far .
While the first stage of crowd funding saw individual projects working off individual websites, the trend now is to use online services such as IndieGoGo.com (or the Australian FundBreak) to find supporters for multiple projects across different disciplines.
The goal is set by the filmmaker, but reaching that financial target should not be the only objective.
“It’s not just raising funds, but also knowing how much interest there is in your project,” said Broderick.
“With documentaries, it’s also an opportunity to do unexpected research and find out new facts,” he added.
Online crowd funding is not reserved to screen creatives, and professionally-created videos are being increasingly used by writers and other artists to promote their projects and raise funds – and, to an extent, raise their own profile in the arts. Some of them clearly have a full business plan and have conceived their novels to be adapted to film, offering potential supporters a glimpse of their cinematic/literary vision.
Of course, talking to a camera is not enough to get people’s attention, and crow funding relies heavily on creating a ‘funny’ version of yourself, and use humour to convince people that your project is worth their time and money.
“Crowd funding forces you to think of the audience before you’ve done anything,” said Broderick.
