Brainstorming then what...

One of the things I'm noticing about building a campaign is that you have to kind of think of everything, every angle, group, friend or helper you can enlist to assist. It is a highly collaborative effort, and though it might be easier to do things on your own, success is highly dependent on triangulating with people you trust, people that have a similar passion for the subject matter.

We have been brainstorming all sorts of ideas and they're mostly good ideas, but I keep getting this feeling like - are we going to follow through on all of this. You can have a website, a twitter feed, facebook page and a whole host of channels - but would it be better to just have 1 channel, one central repository for everything that is "your film". It is becoming clear to me that the website is the "hub" - twitter, facebook, vimeo etc are teh spokes and the spokes need to go two ways, but always back to the website. The website MUST be dynamic in some way, by brute force or by utilizing sophisticated tools.

CHUNKALIZE
It make sense to break the work that needs to be done into logical chunks of work: costs, edit, audience, gifts, etc. Next week there is a big CHUNK - MUSIC. One of the biggest things we need to determine this coming week is what, exactly, will it cost to get the DVD (and other forms) out to the world. Next week I am going through the current edit to gather all the songs that are included and see if there is a way I can shrink that down without impacting the overall story. Quotes right now for songs are 10 cents per song, per dvd. So if I have 30 songs in the documentary that means each DVD requires us to pay $3.00. If that costs goes up to 15 sents then we're at 4.50. That work will take about 30 hours, believe it or not.

This week is the juke joint festival in Clarksdale, wish I was there, but I'll be there in two weeks. Check back as we progress!!

Kickstarter Campaign

We've been working on this film since 2003. When people would tell me that they had been working on their documentary films for 3, 4, 5 years, I'd think - are you nuts? And yet, here we are, 9 years later working to get our first documentary film "Delta Rising" out to the world. The campaign is based on partnering with blues fans around the world to get this film into their hands. Making a film is one thing, covering the music rights, insurance, covering distribution, archival footage etc is another. In order to get this movie out there we need to have our i's dotted and our t's crossed.

Today I worked with one of the other producers, Matthew Goff, to come up with a campaign game plan and are running that by, Laura Bernieri, our other producer. It is important to be clear about your goals, what you're asking people for and why. So we're kicking the kicking of kicking it off off. Stay tuned.