How to Raise Money for a Short Film (a new approach)

It's almost impossible to raise money for a short film without having to beg for it.

For "Wayfarers", Jonathan Knapp (Producer) and I are trying something very new: it's a system I'm calling "Comm Pledge".

Traditionally, to get money, you have to offer something. In TV and radio, ad money flows in exchange for eyeballs. The size of an audience determines the cost of advertisement.

With a short film, what can you offer? Most short films don't have movie stars attached, and they're one-off productions, so there's no way to predict a short's audience. I'll amend that: there's an easy way to predict a short's audience: it's almost always tiny.

At first, Jonathan and I took that as gospel truth, and we looked elsewhere. Perhaps nonprofits would support the film for its education-centric message? I spoke with some folks at a few nonprofits, and the refrain was always the same: there's no money! Of course, underneath that is a more basic problem: what would the money buy? We're back to the audience problem.

I was at a Chanukah party in Long Beach when a friend suggested I re-examine the radio/TV model, with an eye towards the opportunities that the internet might provide. Within a few hours, I had the seed of the Comm Pledge System in mind.

Here's how it works: We are looking for pledges from organizations and people who have a broad digital reach. We're not looking for money, but for a pledge to send one email, to post one facebook status update, or to send one tweet with a hyperlink to "Wayfarers" when it becomes available online. When an organization makes this pledge, they're also giving us a measure of our potential audience. If one organization has a thousand-person email list, and another a 10,000-person list, and the next an 89,000 person list, we now have some important data: when our film is ready, a link will be sent out to 100,000 people. Now, we can develop a viewership forecast.

With a viewership forecast, we can approach corporate sponsors with a tangible, quantifiable offer: Fund the film, and your "sponsored by" title card will have an audience. In some cases, we may even be able to break down the audience by rough demographics: If 25% of the addresses come from, say, indie film organizations, we know 25% of the potential audience is interested in indie films. This provides additional value to the sponsor, especially if the sponsor is interested in reaching a particular demographic.

This is an as-yet un-tested approach, but it's much better than begging friends and family to toss a few bucks in to the latest crowdsourcing website.

We're also offering a "special thanks" credit (and possibly other perks) to our communications pledgers, so if you'd like to participate, please fill out this form:

THE WAYFARERS COMMUNICATIONS PLEDGE

-Arnon Z. Shorr

New Projects in the Works...

New Project 1: "Wayfarers" A short film by Arnon Z. Shorr, in active development at OxRock Productions. A post-apocalyptic Exodus narrative.

New Project 2: "Sex.Sound.Silence" A feature-length drama about a girl pursuing her dream of becoming a successful electronica DJ. A BrokenLine Production, directed by Ari Davis, produced by Arnon Z. Shorr in association with OxRock Productions, LLC