MaHB Film

By the people, for the people.
By Gavin Yap

When I was a kid, you waited for a movie to be made, and to know anything about it, you had to wait for the studio to drop whatever crumbs it deigned. And the only way you could find out about a non-studio-funded film was if a studio announced that it would be distributing it. Nobody knew who Quentin Tarantino was until they saw Reservoir Dogs, and the only reason they did was because Miramax picked it up.

These were the pre-Internet days. Movies didn’t have Facebook pages or Twitter accounts. Filmmakers weren’t able to get the word out about what they were doing, except through print, radio and television. Nowadays, things are completely different. With the studios spending millions on their tentpole films, and millions more to promote and market them, nobody wants to take a gamble on anything anymore.

Every move is calculated, which has forced filmmakers and actors to reach out to fans through crowdsourcing sites, such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, to help realise and protect their creative vision. Kevin Smith’s next film, the long talked about Clerks 3, will be funded entirely by his own money and donations from his Kickstarter campaign.

But the best example of a crowdsourcing success was last year’s Kickstarter fundraiser by Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas and star Kristen Bell, appealing to fans to help raise USD2 million for a movie version of the popular TV series. They reached their goal in 10 hours, breaking several Kickstarter records in the process.

Scrubs star Zach Braff also funded Wish I Was Here, his follow-up to Garden State, entirely through Kickstarter, citing studio tampering as the main reason for going the crowdsourcing route. The same goes for the Sean Bean/Rupert Grint starrer Enemy of Man, a blood and guts adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth that no studio wanted to fund unless USD200,000 was raised for the pre-production process, which, through Kickstarter, they did.

But crowdsourcing doesn’t just give fans a chance to help their favourite actors or filmmakers make what they want to; it also gives them an opportunity to be part of the project itself through cameo roles. The more you give, the more you get, basically. And once they’ve invested in a film, you know damn well the fans are gonna help to sell it; thus, giving a film that hasn’t even been made not only a built-in audience, but also a group of ready-to-go marketeers.

It’s still early days yet. We can only guess how far this democratisation of communication and content creation will go. The big studios aren’t ignoring it either, as seen with a few interactive marketing campaigns recently. This isn’t just changing the way films are marketed, but potentially revolutionising how they’re made. We, the fans, have more power now than we’ve ever had. And if I were a big studio sinking hundreds of millions into films that could potentially cripple me (The Lone Ranger, After Earth, Transcendence), that’s not a problem I’d be thrilled to have.