By Gregory Crofton
Nothing gets work done faster than money. Raising a big chunk, say $70,000 to spend on a documentary without having to answer to a financier used to be unheard of, but no longer.
Filmmakers are turning to the web sites like Kickstarter to raise funds to finish their projects. Since April 2009 when Kickstarter came online it has raised $85 million for independent films, more than $42 million of which went to doc filmmakers. The Kickstarter community to date has helped finance 3,000 short films and 8,000 feature length productions.
Notable documentaries that used Kickstarter include: “DETROPIA,” “AL WEI WEI: NEVER SORRY,” “BROOKLYN CASTLE,” and “THE WAITING ROOM.” An upcoming doc about singer-songwriter Chris Whitley, “DUST RADIO,” set a goal of $55,000 but ended up raising more than $68,000. And in May, Ondi Timoner, the director of “DIG!” and “WE LIVE IN PUBLIC,” raised nearly $145,000 for her latest project “A TOTAL DISRUPTION.” Her goal was $96,000.
“A TOTAL DISRUPTION” is an on-going project to document the “invisible superheroes” using technology to change the world, entrepreneurs like Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler and Charles Adler, the three people who founded Kickstarter. But despite her recent efforts to tell the stories of tech entrepreneurs, Timoner says at first she was resistant to tapping a crowd-funding site to finance her work. She spoke about her change in attitude during the keynote speech she made at the 2013 HOT DOCS Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto.
“I was like, I didn’t want to hold my hand out to fans,” she said. “But in fact, I had to reconfigure it in my brain and look at it as what it actually has turned into, which is building a community, identifying who my fans actually are.” Now that’s she’s identified a lot of those fans they’ve begun sending her tips or stories they’d like her to look into. “I want to maintain a relationship with these people forever. And I’m having these amazing dialogues,” she said. “So the list is growing of content that my audience, my community, wants me to go find.”
Below you can listen to more highlights from Timoner’s April HOT DOC keynote address.