Once A Clown Short Film Financing Tips

Once A Clown Short Film was funded partially via crowdfunding, and partially through the use of my bank overdraft. Our Once a Clown Indiegogo Campaign was unsuccessful. Our goal of £7244 resulted in a final funding amount of just £28. This made it very challenging to make the film, knowing I then had to cut the costs of absolutely everything, using the raised funds for only the most important props. I matched the raised amount myself, resulting in a final figure of somewhere between £500 – 600 .

It’s difficult to know where our campaign failed, while many others succeed. In hindsight, perhaps more research of successful crowdfunding campaigns would have helped us to break through. I had a discussion with a former film producer regarding crowdfunding, though at this point, our crowdfunding campaign was already up and running, and thus, the conversation was too late.

Tips for a Successful Crowdfunding Campaign

The producers advice was to split the campaign into three different sections, and as three separate campaigns.

1. Pre-Production – advertising our concept and where we wanted to go with the idea,
2. Production – the second (if the first was successful) for production – explaining that we had reached our pre-production goal and that our production now needed this new amount to cover filming, and
3. Post-Production – the third campaign (assuming the first and second were successful) to cover post-production and costs such as distribution, editing, colouring etc.

Filmmaking is a lesson, and there’s no guaranteed, successful way to do it. As unsuccessful as this campaign was, it was still much more successful than our first (we raised roughly £70 for our webseries in 2016), so perhaps as people begin to become aware of our company, and of our productions, they will feel more comfortable contributing to or campaign, knowing that with barely any money at all, we are able to create enjoyable, good quality content.

So the thought final thought is: “What could they do if they had funding?”

Author: Murphy Rhodes
Location: Liverpool, England
Film: Once a Clown (2018)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6158160/

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