Crowdfunding from Putty Hill to Berlin

Thanks to Ted Hope for bringing Matthew Porterfield's partly crowdfunded "Putty Hill" to my attention. This microbudget feature is screening at Berlin this week.

Worn out by the long development and funding process of the traditional film industry process, Matthew resorted to using an improvised script, mostly non-professional cast and crew, a free camera rental, $20,000, and 12 days to shoot his second feature film, Putty Hill.

PUTTY HILL trailer from Matt Porterfield on Vimeo.

The film was invited to Berlin and SXSW, but it was not yet finished. Putty Hill was still in post-production, the producers had over $10k credit card debt, and festival and marketing expenses were adding up.

They mounted two fundraising campaigns locally (a silent auction + sneak peek of film clips, behind-the-scenes, and Q&A), which raised $5k, and Kickstarter helped them raise another $5K in the space of one week. I.e. 10k = debt paid off, but they needed at least another $10k to get the film ready for exhibition. They ran a second kickstarter campaign, and raised over $18,000 in the space of a month.

Kickstarter is an online money raising site that anyone can use to crowdfund their project. Filmmakers establish the goal amount they want to raise, but must be realistic, because if pledged amounts fail to add up to the goal, pledges are not held to account. This minimises risk to donors, who don't have money taken from their account till after the full budget has been raised, and equally doesn't leave filmmakers in a postition where they only have half the money and can't meet their obligations to the donors.

Kickstarter makes it easy for filmmakers to set rewards for different donation amounts. In the case of Putty Hill, there are 14 levels of donation, starting from $1. Some examples:
-$1 Kickstarter updates
-$5 Putty Hill postcard & pin above
-$25 Special Thanks credit in DVD release & t-shirt & above
-$50 A signed copy of Matt Porterfield's first film "Hamilton" on DVD, & above
-$500 Limited edition Putty Hill archival print photograph, & above.
-$5,000 Onscreen Executive Producer credit

What was done well
- Tapped into the local Baltimore community (which the film was in part about).
- Exceeded their stated funding goals
- Easy to read website with all the information you need about the film.
- Social networking (facebook, Twitter, Vimeo)
- Nice range of rewards for kickstarter donations
- Successfully communicated their story to a range of online and mainstream media (GQ, local newspaper, radio, blogs, indiewire, etc).
- Selected for screening at good festivals.

What could be improved
Given more lead time, I would recommend more online community building, some way of harvesting email addresses, behind-the-scenes material, creating more dialogue with the potential audience, and so on. However, considering that this film was thrown together shortly after funding on another project fell through, they've done an excellent job of pulling it off. 

I did however have trouble finding a poster image for inclusion here, so marketing collateral asap would be wise.

At this point I don't know anything about their planned distribution and monetisation strategy - if they're doing anything interesting I'll post an update discussing it.