KICKSTARTER HALL OF FAMER: How Jennifer Fox and Her MY REINCARNATION Team
Raised $150,000.
The AAIFF’11 invited award winning documentary filmmaker Jennifer Fox and her team: Stephanie Diaz, Catherine Mulphy and Lisa Duva to share how her latest film MY REINCARNATION became the number one top fundraiser for a finished film on Kickstarter. MY REINCARNATION follows the high Tibetan master, Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche and his Italian born son, Yeshi. The film 20-years in the making, tells the story of one of the last reincarnate teachers to be trained in Tibet and his son’s stubborn reluctance to follow in his father’s footsteps.
Jennifer Fox is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning Producer, Director, Camerawoman. She is known for her groundbreaking work on both documentary features and series, including BEIRUT: THE LAST HOME MOVIE, AN AMERICAN LOVE STORY, FLYING CONFESSIONS OF A FREE WOMAN, and now MY REINCARNATION. She has Executive Produced many award winning films, including LOVE & DIANE, ON THE ROPES and UPSTATE. She teaches and consults on directing and producing internationally at institutions such as New York University, the Binger Lab in Amsterdam, the University of Zurich and many others.
Stefanie Diaz is a graphic designer and digital effects artist. She has also worked as a post-production intern for the award winning feature film THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT. Stefanie currently serves as Associate Producer at Zohe Film Productions.
Katherine Nolfi’s first feature film, UPSTATE (co-directed with Andrew Luis), premiered in competition at the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival. Katherine has directed several short films, including UNLIMITED (SXSW 2009) and MOUTH BABIES (co-directed with Lisa Duva), an official selection of the 2011 Slamdance Film Festival. Katherine is producing Lisa Duva’s feature directorial debut, CAT SCRATCH FEVER, currently in post-production.
Lisa Duva wrote and co-directed the short film MOUTH BABIES with Katherine Nolfi, which premiered at the 2011 Slamdance Film Festival. She co-produced and assistant directed the independent feature film UPSTATE, an official selection of the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival. Lisa is currently in post-production on her first feature film, CAT SCRATCH FEVER.
Our moderator is John Anderson, a journalist, critic, and Chairman of the New York Film Critic Circle.
Welcome!
John Anderson: Thank you. Kickstarter is useful in two ways, where in the effort to raise money, you’re also establishing your public relations campaign for the film.
Jennifer Fox: I think we learned along the way that there are a lot of PR value to the campaign, but the real impetus was being $100,000 in debt, and seeing no way out of the box, so it was out of that kind of nightmare, that I unwillingly got into Kickstarter; but I knew that Catherine had done a Kickstarter campaign before.
Katherine Nolfi: There was some fear to say Jennifer Fox, as an established filmmaker, to say I’m in trouble.
JA: What did you learn in your previous campaign that helped you with this one?
KN: I think what’s really interesting in what we really learned, is the scale it can be to the project. The previous campaign was a small narrative film, and we just need to raise $15,000 for production costs. Jennifer has a built-in audience not just from her fans, but primarily from the Buddhist candidate, and that’s why we knew we could go larger with more target audiences.
JF: For us, our original goal was $50,000, and we were really scared about that. Originally, we thought maybe $30,000, $25,000, so we were really scared to put it up to 50. If we asked for 25, we wouldn’t get far enough in the debt, so we put the initial campaign at 50, but with a lot of terror.
JA: But did you think you were overstepping that 50,000, or it was completely out of …
JF: I thought it was impossible. For a regular Kickstarter campaign, it is between 5 and 15,000, so it is a huge jump for us to go that far.
JA: I was following it, casually, and going insane. You hit the 50 mark, then the 70 mark; and then all of a sudden, it sort of took off.
Lisa Duva: People get very excited to donate when you first tell them about it. Think for the first couple weeks, we got steady donations, and you can see we were averaging money everyday. But everything petered out and we hit this wall, and then it hit 50. We thought nobody is going to donate to us because they think we’ve reached our goal. So then we retooled everything; our entire message changed. It became about explaining to people why we needed extra money.
KN: I think our largest asset throughout the whole campaign is Jennifer and her writing style: very honest and very raw. It’s about the story, and it’s not personal. During the whole process, she was having a personal relationship with the donors, asking them specific questions to understand their interest in the film.
JF: We had an effort to engage the people once somebody would donate. I would write and say, “Oh great, thank you,” and of course, I’d have to edit the paragraph, and I usually put something personal in, for example, “Oh I see you’re from Germany, how did you find out about the campaign,” and try to engage them to write back. And we also offered incentives. Steph, do you want to talk about it?
Stephanie Diaz: We had the incentives page. For every level of donation, participants received a small gift. For everyone who contributed a dollar, or less than 10 dollars, they get their name on the website. We realized you have to trade in something tangible because a lot of Kickstarter campaigns have their hearts in the right place; but you need to put money and effort into it and get some good graphics, because otherwise, it’s just an idea and nothing exist. So even like the t-shirt, we didn’t even have the t-shirt yet, but we had the idea of the t-shirt, and Lisa showing images of what you can get, and that really drives people.
JA: When you hit the 50,000 mark, and then you decided to pursue more money… what changed?
SD: We were basically putting up bigger items. And by then, it was such a movement, that people were just going for them.
JA: Well just for people who don’t know, or are presumably interested, when you go on Kickstarter, you have to set a goal.
KN: Yes, but the top 30 or so campaign that raised the most money, all of them exceeded their goals by close to a hundred or 300 percent. If you can get past your goal and keep pushing, after a while, it just picks up momentum and it snowballs.
JA: What kind of language was used throughout the process?
KN: We removed all language that suggested donating early on; because you’re not donating, you’re actually getting something. There’s actually an exchange of goods. You’re joining a movement, or actually supporting the arts, and you’re putting your dollars into something you want to see.
LD: People want to participate and support the arts, and they want to feel involved.
JA: So you guys were really persistent with communications?
JF: Once people started communicating, I realized that I should back up. Being an old-school filmmaker, I think the less cooks in the kitchen, the better. And I feel opening a Kickstarter campaign, is inviting the world, not only into your process, but to your problem–your financial problem, which I found very scary. But then once we started, I realized that by inviting them into your process, you are also gaining advocates. Not only did we have people who donated become advocates for the project, but we had people like a woman who wrote me from Italy, saying that I have no money, but I want to start blogging for you, how can I help? She started posting all over the web, and suddenly our ability to hit the web became a hundred folds.
LD: During the recession, you know a lot of people don’t have money, but that doesn’t mean they can’t participate. If you don’t have money, you can still contribute your time and be our outreach partner, and you can be a catalyst of the project. They can download mini posters and spread the word in their community.
JF: We updated our website with a new video every week. We would do travel updates, and then put it on the website. We would tell people to go to the website and Facebook, and then we tell everybody on Facebook to go to Kickstarter. And then we started a series called OFFS, which are outtakes from the film: 2-minute, 4-minute scenes that were not in the film, sort of gifts to the Buddhist community, who were willing and waiting hungrily for the film. We asked ourselves “How do you get people to keep coming back?” and we kept posting new incentives for people to revisit the website.
JA: Did people ask about why you need the money if this film is finished?
KN: Yes. Our biggest obstacle was that we were raising money for a film that was already finished. We’re not in debt anymore, even though we were, but we’d say, we aren’t in debt anymore. Now if you give more money, we can distribute. It became about an important document that’s one of the few things that’s keeping a culture in exile alive. So it’s not about Jennifer and her career, it’s about this film; it’s about this teacher; and it’s about this document, so keep supporting it.
JF: Every festival I went to, we handed it out to everybody going in the film, and when I would do Q&A, I would plant the programmer to ask me a question about fundraising, and someone in the middle of the Q&A she would say: so how did you raise money, and I would say, well, we haven’t, and I would do a pitch for Kickstarter at the festival. Nobody batted an eye. I was shocked it actually wasn’t an issue.
JA: Katherine alluded before that times are tough. People don’t have any money, and this looks like the solution to, you know, grants drying up, nonprofits drying up, and you know, the charitable sources drying up. But why did you end up in Kickstarter? Did you go through the usual channels try to pre-sell the film?
JF: It was a 20-year project. Primarily it was funded with my own money. I shot it for probably 12 years without any money, just because I do my own camerawork, and I would be able to raise money for about 12 years. It took about 18 years before we brought any real money into the project and then it was primarily broadcasters. It does have six international broadcasters on board, and it has a few grants. It is a film very hard to get foundation grants because it’s a spiritual subject. And if you know the way grants fund, they basically fund political subjects in America. One of my strength is foreign funding. We didn’t qualify for any European grants because we were fundraising too late. The film has four co-producers on it: a German, Swiss, Dutch, and a Finnish co-producer. However, our Italian co-producer had promised $100,000 into the pot, and that would’ve completed the project, but they end up raising zero, so we spent that $100,000 to complete the film, and they did not give us any money. I was $100,000 in debt. I had a finished film, and I couldn’t pay the bills both backward and forward ‘cause some of them were still pending.
JA: People would say, well why don’t you have money, what’s wrong with this film that you don’t have people coming out would work to give you money.
JF: I think everybody in the film business know how hard it is. Making films is quite an expensive post-production. I would say Kickstarter is now a piece of the puzzle, but I wouldn’t say Kickstarter is the whole puzzle.
JA: How big is this piece of puzzle?
JF: It can be anywhere—a piece of your funding puzzle to your whole puzzle. For me it might be a part of the plan, where I say I’m gonna get x amount from broadcasters, x amount from crowd funding, and x amount from maybe foundation support, etc. But warning, this is a particularly good crowd-funding film. It is a Buddhist subject with a very niche audience that can be targeted. We had a very broad base, but the people who gave the large amounts were followers of this teacher. And it attracts an international audience, who we could target, and we could get list-servs to e-blast for us. The big donors were not film people, and were not family or friends. They were Buddhists and I think that’s a really important thing.
JA: That seems to be a major catch on using the internet to either market your film or whatever creative work since you have a very specific audience.
JF: Despite the target, we had to keep brainstorming how to widen our reach and contact the press.
LD: We just knew at that point, we had a story that people are potentially interested. We knew we had to widen our scope: how do we do that? My idea was that there are blogs out there. Let’s just get in touch with them directly. We got support from Ted Hope and his blog. We got on the Huffington Post, and that brought us a whole new audience.
KN: We created an impression that this is a movement, and that helps energize the community.
LD: I don’t think that anyone who read the post turned around and donated, but it did give us another reason to email people and say, “hey look what is happening is huge,” and the Buddhist community responded very well and gave more money.
JF: We also did sneak preview screenings because if people have never seen the film, they wouldn’t give money to it. We ended up with a video of the father, who is a very important Buddhist master on camera, saying he thought it was a great film. When we emailed that video around, a lot of people in the Buddhist community reacted.
KN: People want to participate in successful movements. We asked people about their reactions to the film, and it was overwhelmingly positive, so we put together a testimonial video, and I think it fed really well into this idea of a movement.
LD: Everything had to be coherent; everything fed into our brand. We knew our audience was primarily a Buddhist audience, and they didn’t want to see a face or ego behind the film. We wanted it to be about the movement, and about the teacher, and about the community, and about the donors themselves. That was on the forefront of our minds the entire time.
JA: Did people understand the functionality of Kickstarter?
KN: We explained how Kickstarter worked because a lot of audience never used Kickstarter before, and I think it’s safe to assume a lot of your audience had never used Kickstarter before, as popular as it is becoming…
LD: We knew that most of audience would be international. We knew that most of them will be older than 40, and that automatically excludes people from knowing about this technology. The more explicit you can be, even if you think your audience would be a bunch of tech-savvy twenty year olds, over-explain.
JA: What do audiences learn from this process?
JF: Not only is it spiritual, but also democratic participation. I felt a democratic patron of the arts for the first time in history.
JA: What kind of strategy did other Kickstarter campaigns use?
LD: One campaign offered others to pay with any amount of money for a limited period of time, and they ended up making quite a bit. If you’re a huge artist, it is better because you know you can get a lot of money, and you don’t have to answer to anyone but your fans and yourself. But if you’re a very small emerging artist, I think you can only do it so many times until people say enough.
JF: Other than that, it’s also about pressing all the right buttons at the right moment.
JA: How about conventional fundraising?
JF: All of you out there who have done foundation grants, that’s like Russian roulette. The thing about foundation grants is that we work and work and work, and 99.99% of the time the answer is no. With Kickstarter, if you have a film with targeted audiences, you can probably raise a certain amount of money.
JA: What is the process of bringing in broadcasters?
JF: For example, Arte, we were able to bring in $150,000 as well. To do that, I had to put together a German co-production partner. We had to write about a 25-page synopsis, cut a trailer, set up meetings, and pitch. I had to go to Germany, and it was about eight months worth of work. And that was a very successful eight months. But Kickstarter was even more successful. I would just say it’s always hard and raising money always require being creative.
Audience: Why did you decide to go with Kickstarter instead of something like IndieGoGo? Where, you know, at least if you don’t make your goal, IndieGoGo, you can at least keep the money. And then the second question is, how did you guys get paid to work on the project?
JF: First rule of thumb is, you have to make a great trailer. The trailer is about cliffhanger, so I think you really have to think about what sells, about making people want more, and that is a workshop in itself. Leaving people hungry, feeling that there’s enough production value in the film, but they want to see more. We left the audience really hungry with the trailer.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/29157823[/vimeo]One of our biggest things we sold on Kickstarter, was a pre-sell of the video at $108. We sold over a hundred units of that; and that, in itself, is $10,000. Prior to Kickstarter, we had sold about 250 units of that so we raised $35,000 pre-selling our video before the commercial DVD. The proper commercial DVD will go out in 2012. It’s very cheap, and it’s about $2.50 to make, so it’s 95% profit. I really like the Kickstarter model that people don’t pay their money until you raised the full amount. On IndieGoGo while you get your money continually, the incentive for the donor isn’t as high. Donate, why? Because you donated to a project that still needs 20,000 more, you are gonna be really out there to support it. So people really want to see you succeed. They know you won’t get paid otherwise, and I think that incentive is positive. And it’s higher risk, but it creates more energy.
JA: Was there any conflict between theatrical distribution and DVD pre-sell?
JF: We going out theatrically in October 2011, so we ask the theatrical distributor: are you worried that we sold approximately 100 DVDs in the United States; the rest are international, and she said no. But she did not want that up on our website when she was approaching theaters. And it doesn’t seem to have worried the DVD sales people because we have an offer on the table from two or three companies right now. We are no longer selling the DVD. It was a pre-order, a once in a lifetime possibility. We are pre-selling the 2012 DVD at $25, which is coming out at some point. So, so far it hasn’t bitten us in the back. However, even if it did, we still made more money on that DVD than any previous DVD sales because every DVD sale I have ever made have not made any money except for my advance, which wasn’t more than $20,000. We’ve already done better on this, than any other DVD, which is amazing.
Audience: You mentioned that the film is finished, how many donors saw the film and gave versus those who didn’t?
JF: It’s been in a lot of festivals, so I don’t’ know, 10 or 20% probably saw it and donated. Honestly, we have quite a great reaction. Many of the big donors had never seen the film, but the trailer was so moving for them, where people wrote us and said they cried from the trailer, so the trailer did a good sales job. And we also found out that one of our associate producers had Chinese donors, and I wrote: hi who are you, where are you, and they said 60 people in China got together to give you a $10,000 donation.
Audience: Why are you guys doing a theatrical release when so much of it is web based already?
JF: We’re kind of doing a typical platforming, just I’m definitely interested in the web eyes, but we’re also thinking about the cinema experience where people can have dialogue. I’m still quite wetted to the group experience in a cinema.
Audience: How long should a Kickstarter campaign last?
LD: If you have a large amount of money that you wanna raise, shorter is better. We try to roll out the campaign in waves. You start out with your tightest, closest audience, and you expand a wider net, assuming 5 days to a week, it grows. So sit down realistically and think: what is my audience? How can I cast these wider nets? How long realistically will it take for me to do that? How much work can you do beforehand knowing that while it’s happening everything’s gonna change and you’re gonna have to retool and change constantly.
KN: If your subject is exciting, political, and something everybody wants to engage in, then 30 days may be all you need.
JF: I was surprised at how long 90-days is because it didn’t seem long when we started. It is true that web-time is much slower or faster.
LD: You also have to plan things out, so that you’re sending new, good quality information out on the Monday of every week… Monday or Tuesday. Otherwise, it’s being pushed down to the end of the inbox, and nobody’s going to read it or pay attention, so you have to organize your schedule.
JA: One more question.
Audience: Where can we find more information regarding this film?
JF: Yes, it’s myreincarnationfilm.com and if you want to email us, it’s info@myreincarnationfilm.com.
SD: And we also have a Facebook account it’s Facebook.com/myreincarnation. We have already 3,000 people who have friended us, so friend us on that, we’ll talk to you!
JF: We do answer everything.