The Cosmonaut Model for Crowdfunding & Crowdsourcing

One small step for man, one giant leap for indie film... The Spanish indie film The Cosmonaut has perhaps the best crowdfunding model I’ve seen so far, and has also incorporated crowdsourced elements and freemium techniques.

[Thanks to Robert Pratten for pointing me in the direction of this project - do check out his fantastic articles on transmedia, indie film, and crowdsourcing.]

The Cosmonaut offers two ways for a crowd member to become involved in funding:

1. With any merchandise purchase from the store.
Items begin for as little as 2 Euro for a Welcome Pack, through to t-shirts, Special Edition DVD presales, and real soviet space memorabilia, with the most expensive item 25 Euro.
Any purchase brings the following benefits:
- Name in the film credits as a “Producer”
- The welcome pack consisting of a badge, stickers, and certificate
- Entry into the competition to win a real cosmonaut suit

That is pretty amazing value if you ask me!

2. By becoming an “Investor” for 1000 Euro or more, and signing a contract, you will have share in any profits made from the film.

The Cosmonaut in 5 steps from Riot Cinema on Vimeo.

Crowdsourcing the publicity materials
The Cosmonaut is crowdsourcing some design elements with competitions that are open to the public. They currently have a competition to design the film poster.

Freemium aspects
When the film is finished, the filmmakers will be releasing it online for free to the general public under a creative commons license. They are allowing anyone to reuse or repurpose any element of the film.

By making the film available online for free, and in mashable form, it will increase how many people watch the film, increase the spreadability, and if just a small proportion of these people convert into purchasers, it will be profitable.

Monetisation
The monetisation of this film seems to be entirely through the merchandise store, with no plans for traditional revenue from cinema or TV sales. On first glance, this may appear a bit limited, to not capitalise on the greater film rights. On the other hand, the financial risk associated with the film is lessened due to the advance funding via merchandise sales. There are fewer investors/debtors needing payback. And, the notion behind freemium content is that if the content is of value, it will spread, and you only need a small proportion of people to convert for it to become a success financially.

This might not work on a big budget film, but The Cosmonaut film budget is only 415,000 Euros, of which 67% is being provided by the filmmaking team (their time and resources invested for profit share). All they need to raise in cash is 136,950 Euros to make the film a reality, and they already have achieved 1492 producers in just over 6 months.

They have also staged a music event as an additional film fundraiser. I’m not sure how this went, but from past experience I’ve realised sometimes fundraisers end up costing more in time and resources than are equivalent to funds raised. You can easily fall into the trap where, if everyone who donated their time and resources towards holding the fund raiser simply put that time into their normal job and then donated the proceeds you’d have more money with less effort... (Would love to hear from you if you have had better success in this area than I have, share some tips with us!)

More reasons for the thumbs up:

• Cracker of a film logline and synopsis. This is a movie I want to see!
• The script is provided, so people can work out if it is a movie they want to be involved with. (However, this is a Spanish film, the script is therefore in Spanish, and I can’t read it. Any Spanish speakers out there, I would love if you could read and review it, send me a link to your blog).
• They’ve gained public support from real Russian cosmonauts.
• Really cool stuff for sale in their store, not just “merchandising”, but soviet space themed collector’s items that would be hard to track down another way.
• The crowdsourced design competitions are open to anyone; you don’t have to be a member. This increases number of people participating, and those who get involved in a non-committal manner may upgrade to paying “producer” at a later stage.
• While it’s a Spanish film they have a website with English translation, extending their potential audience.
• Supported by a good filmmaker blog, and easy to link in with Facebook, Twitter, and a variety of other social networking sites.
• Good transparency, clearly naming names of those involved, their experience, what the crowd receives in exchange for their money, and what the film itself is about. 

What could be improved:
While the website has a nice clean design, it could do with a site map, some additional “pages” with certain information, and easy to find “fact sheet”. For example:

- Some pertinent information for potential investors is gained by downloading the Press Kit, a spot where many in the “crowd” might not think to look.

- There isn’t an obvious link from the main website to the blog (ideally the blog would be hosted on the same site, perhaps under the title “news”).

- The dual language is fantastic in meeting needs of English speakers, but this is not continuous across all media. The Twitter feed, for example, is all in Spanish. I can’t blame them for this – none of my projects are in any language other than English, so they are doing far better than me – but my own selfish personal desire would be to follow them in the language that I can read.

On the whole I am very impressed with The Cosmonaut's crowdfunding business model, am considering a purchase from their store myself, and, perhaps most importantly - I can't wait to watch the film!