One of the most important questions that you should ask yourself when preparing a crowd funding campaign is “Why should people support your project?”. I think it’s pretty clear from your point of view “So you can make your project” but have you considered the point of view of the people who you want to support your project as well? What’s in it for them? “Perks” you say, right? Well, I think that perks are not the really the source of motivation. I consider them more the icing on the cake.

In order to direct actors properly, it helps to understand what acting really is and how actors work. In my recent blog post Understanding Acting for Directors I summed up the most important aspects of how actors work and what acting actually is (reacting not pretending). To be honest, I was really overwhelmed with directing [...]

I think I have stated it several times already that acting is next to screenwriting the most important element for a great movie. This is why I want to understand acting as well as screenwriting. As a matter of fact, I think that screenwriting and acting aren’t that different after all. Screenwriting usually takes place in solitude and is mostly original work whereas acting means working with others closely and is interpretative art but at the end of the day, it’s both about understanding and creating believable characters.

It’s been a week and a half since our crowd funding campaign for Project Homophobia ended, reaching $10,000 on December 10th during our kick-off party in Vienna. After nine weeks of campaigning and another month of preparation, it took me another week to wrap the campaign up. I had to make sure that everyone received their perks that were due already such as personal thank-you-videos or invitations to the closed Facebook group. I also needed to prepare the mailing list on mailchimp.com in order to send out our monthly project updates keeping in touch with our backers. All in all, it took us 14 weeks to prepare, execute and wrap the campaign.

There are directors that claim that casting is half the work. My two top priorities for a film production are script and casting. If these two components don’t work there is little chance that the movie will get any good. This is why I invest a great deal into the development of a script and casting.

In contrast to script development, that can be done fairly cheap, casting a movie is not necessarily a cheap endeavor. Since Project Homophobia is a collaborative short film project that makes heavily use of social media, I thought why not do a part of the casting process online as well? This not only lets our crowd funding supportes be part of the casting process, but saves us time and money as well. So I came up with the idea of doing an online casting.

Last Saturday, our crowd funding campaign for Project Homophobia on IndieGoGo ended. We had a kick-off party in Vienna to celebrate the success of the campaign and the official start of the project. I held a speech and talked about homophobia in general and gay bullying in specific in the context of the term “culture of fear”, that is used by Brené Brown in her wonderfully insightful book “I thought It Was Just Me“.

Since the crowd funding campaign for Project Homophobia runs so well and smoothly, IndieGoGo.com asked me to answer some question for them in a video. That’s what I did. Following you find the 5 minutes video answering the following questions:

In yesterday’s screenwriting class at UCLA, our instructor Chris Kyle provided us with a three pages rant about the three act structure written by John Truby. I have to admit that I really enjoyed the read and that I can relate to a lot of things John writes about, especially to the metaphor of the three act structure as the training wheels of the school of drama.

It’s been three weeks since we started our crowd funding campaign for Project Homophobia and we reached our goal of $6.000 today. So first things first. Yay! Now, we have another six weeks to go though and a couple of aces up our sleeves. So this is not the end. This is the second post of a series on our approach and experience with crowd funding and I am going to talk about setting up the framework for a successful crowd funding campaign.

It has been two weeks now that we started our international crowd funding campaign for Project Homophobia on IndieGoGo. I want to take the opportunity to reflect on the last two weeks, document the seven weeks that are ahead of us and explain our take on the campaign for everyone who might think of starting their own. So, this will be the first post in a series of blog posts on the crowd funding campaign of Project Homophobia.

This blog post is a response to a blog discussion that was initated by Wolfgang Gumpelmaier on his blog socialfilmmarketing.com. The topic of the discussion aims for a debate about co-funding film projects through public grants and crowd funding. I am neither an expert in crowd funding nor culture politics but I am a filmmaker who just started his first crowd funding campaign for his upcoming collaborative short film Homophobia. I thought I just add my two cents to the discussion from my point of view in the context of Project Homophobia.