Previously I talked about crowdfunding and how a lot of passion and no track record doesn’t really get you much in terms of financial support through kickstarter or indiegogo these days. For this I want to talk about a different way to acquire funds. One that might add a little more stress to your already stressful production, but might also be more rewarding than say delivering a poster or T-shirt to your campaign backers (I very much enjoyed creating our campaign shirts).

I ended up getting the bulk of my budget through a sort of investment strategy. People invested money into the production and the goal is for those folks to see a return on that investment. In base terms it is a rather standard way to get capital for any project or business venture. For me though, out in the middle of flyover country, with no contacts of the investor type it wasn’t exactly a cut and dry process. Further the idea of convincing people to invest in something as unconventional as an ultra low budget movie requires a lot of faith on the investors part.

A quick aside about the juxtaposition of wanting to make art and needing money to do it. To be a writer you don’t need much. I have a computer, but if I didn’t I can get paper and pens on the cheap. It doesn’t cost anything really, but time to write stories. And so most of my learning as a storyteller has been through writing. Musicians can go a long way on a little money. Sure you can amass a collection of guitars or buy a $15,000 violin, but I’d say you ought to master the $300 one before purchasing the Strad. For filmmaking there is a concept to do it for little, but it still costs more than writing. And a film, pretty much any feature film, requires more than just one person. I’m fairly certain I couldn’t sit through a narrative feature that one person made solely by themselves.

Anyway, for my project I needed money, I had hoped to get a decent portion of it from crowdfunding, which didn’t happen, as I talked about. I also intended to seek out investors. There was this interview I remember seeing with Bruce Campbell (Ash from Evil Dead) where he talks about how they got the cash together to make Evil Dead. Basically Raimi and and other members of the team threw an investor party and invited anyone they knew to it and pitched the movie. Not everyone invested, but they did  get enough to make the film. Well I didn’t throw a party, but rather sent out letters and emails to likely people I knew with as much information as I could about the film. I sat down with people and pitched the movie, myself and what the risks were in investing. Over the course of a few months I cobbled together our production budget (most of pre-production came out of my own pocket). Now virtually all of my financial partners in the venture are friends and family who were close enough to me to see the passion that I and the other crew members involved at that stage were putting into it. One particular investor was a neighbor who had been helping us build the cabins we needed for our sets. He did this simply because he liked the idea of building these period looking cabins. Now he knew next to nothing about the business of movie making, but saw what we were putting into the project and one day (while we were working on the roof  I believe) I was talking about the business side of it all and he asked about putting in some money. I had told him the gist of the movie and other things about how we would go about making the thing and he knew I wasn’t tested and proven on delivering a production like this to an end, but he easily saw the amount of work going into the thing and wanted to back us based on that. The prospect of a financial return was nice, but in a way secondary. In a way he’ll have a bit more out of it than other investors as he’ll be able to watch the film and see his actual carpentry work and labor up on screen.

The financial return is where this approach might add a bit more stress to an already anxiety filled endeavor. It also adds to the challenge, which is part of it for me personally. The challenge not just to create a good movie, bit a viable product that can pay for itself in the end. There’s a balance in that ‘pay for itself’ idea. As in, creating a product for a budget that I felt I could return the investment. Would three or four times the money spent mean three or four times the potential return? Maybe not. Remember pretty much all of us working on it were working a regular paying job at the same time. We would have been on our insane schedule all the same. And time was always the issue. We made the budget work with the shooting schedule we had. To add more time essentially means we all would have to be doing this as our full time job and thus the budget would have needed to grow ten times over rather than three or four. Returning back our investment package seems doable with the film and the market. Returning back ten times the investment package seems a harder proposition. These were all thoughts I had from the outset, and now after filming is wrapped and we’re into post production I feel like the right decisions were made.

We still need more money to finish out post production and I’ll address that when I figure it all out and see how that shakes out in the end.