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| Poster by Walter Sickert |
We had no plans to do additional fundraising after the end of the Kickstarter campaign for TEN. Surprisingly, however, we’ve had a lot of people say that they all together missed us talking about the Kickstarter campaign (I can’t believe it either! 🙂 ) or just didn’t have any money available at the time to be part of it.
If you already gave to the campaign, you are awesome, we love you, and this is not really meant to be directed at you! We are not asking you for more money. We won’t be posting this repeatedly, but just wanted to give people the option to be part of the project, even though the KS campaign has ended.
We knew going in that the movie would cost more than the $11,000 (actually 10 after KS fees) we had asked for. Remarkably, we even went beyond our goal, raising $12,001 (around $11,000 after fees and -only- one failed payment). This is a huge piece of our budget for the movie. We’ve been trying to find ways to keep costs down. We’ve cut crew to the very minimum. We’ve put people to work on multiple jobs/tasks. We’ve taken donations/loans on gear, etc. Still, this movie is going to cost us no less than $20,000 to make. We knew this all along, so it’s not a surprise. We set the KS goal to about half of that because we felt like it was what we could realistically raise, while still being able to manage to get this thing done. We had saved money all year knowing that we might want to take on a big project at the end of this year, so we were ready to absorb a significant cost ourselves. That said, every dollar we put into the budget of this movie will make it a better movie.
Many people don’t realize how quickly you burn through money on film projects. People often cite successful low budget films like El Mariachi, shot for $5000, while ignoring the fact that the distribution studio then spent more than $100,000 cleaning up the audio, and another unknown sum promoting the film before any of us saw the thing. You have probably never seen a film that had less than $100,000 dumped into it in some form (production, post, promotion, etc.). Our goal is to make something “worth” $100,000 for $20,000. We think we can do it (you can be the judge of our degree of delusion).
Because so many people have asked us about giving money to the project, we have decided to take further donations and continue to give the rewards from our Kickstarter campaign. See the Kickstarter page for rewards. There are a few exceptions. The following rewards are no longer available: Pig and Whistle, Hogwash, Babe, Porky Pig, Lipstick on a pig, and When Pigs Fly.
You can become a backer of this project by either sending us money via Paypal to MJE@MichaelJEpstein.com