I feel like I should be blogging on big important topics and having meaningful conversations, as many of my friends are doing. The reality, however (as I told someone yesterday when he asked my opinion on a recent tempest in a teacup), is that I lack the time and energy to devote to the big important topics and meaningful conversations that some of my other friends are pursuing. I’m going to just have to go with that, and trust that my half-assed book and movie reviews will be sufficient until I have more brain. Check back with me in what, five or eight years?
In the meantime, someone is running an Indiegogo campaign for an Alaskan-filmed SF TV pilot.
In theory I find this wildly exciting. Nobody ever does this kind of thing in Alaska, and I love that somebody’s trying. And it’s SF! Extra cool! Yay!
In practice, while I hope they succeed, I also really wish they were doing an all-or-nothing campaign, rather than IndieGoGo’s “this project will get all the funds raised at the end of the campaign” option. $25K is a lot, and I guess I feel like you have to think through the details a lot more carefully if you know it’s all or nothing. I would’ve set a much lower initial goal, like, if we reach $5K we film X, if we reach $10K, we go to Z to film Y, if we hit $25K we get to make the whole thing. I dunno. I want them to succeed, but I don’t care for the setup, which makes me reluctant to participate as a funder.
OTOH, I have now learned there are sand dunes west of Fairbanks somewhere. I’d had no idea. Huh.
Speaking of Kickstarting (or whatever), there’s been a lot of wildly intelligent commentary about the Veronica Mars movie project Kickstarter. Short version, cult hit TV show creator convinces Warner Brothers to make the movie that fans want by proposing a Kickstarter project to raise $2m in seed money & prove there’s an audience for the film. Other people immediately get offended that big studios are Kickstarting, because how dare they take money that should be for little people doing little projects that can’t get studio approval! Example of such here.
Discussion here, here, and from Harry Connolly, here and here.
Now, I admit I had a moment of that “it’s not fair!” when Amanda Palmer’s Kickstarter did so very well, and I copped to it then, too, as part of getting over myself. Because in the end, it’s not taking money away from me, and indeed, a whole lot of the 57K people supporting the Veronica Mars thing had never even heard of Kickstarter before their favorite show went up on it, and now they’re part of that community. So not only is it not taking money away from me, but it’s increasing the chances that sometime somebody will *give* money to me, just because there are now more people out there who know the site exists and might be poking around on it.
Kickstarter, like so much in life, is not a zero sum game. Good to remember, eh?