How to correctly budget your crowdfunding campaign

The other day, I posted the results of a survey I'm working on as an on-going project to get a better sense of how perks are distributed across Kickstarter campaigns. I won't bore you with the details, but basically it's a survey of almost every successful Film & Video Kickstarter campaign since August of last year (it took a loooong time to finish). Then, I spit out the numbers, put them online, and went back to drinking.

Easy, right?

Well, what I forgot to factor in is that not everyone shares my affinity for statistics. You see, I'm kind of a stat nerd. I grew up obsessing over baseball statistics and pretty much taught myself Excel in high school as a means of winning my fantasy baseball league. I was always good at math. I took AP Calculus in high school and even considered minoring in Math for a bit. I minored in Writing instead. And Pre-Law.

Anyway, after posting the data, I kind of assumed that everyone would know what to do with it, but of course not everyone does. So, here we go. This might get a little nerdy. But it's worth it.

The first thing you need to understand is the concept of Expected Value (ooohhh…Probability Theory). I came across EV (that's what we call it) when I used to play poker for a living, where it's a really big deal.

EV in gambling kind of works like this: Let's say I offer you a bet. We'll roll a standard 6-sided dice. When "4" comes up, I'll pay you $6. When any other number comes up, you pay me $1. Do you take the bet? (Yes.) The reason you do is because if we do this 6 times (or 600), chances are that the "4" will come up once and you will make $6. But the other 5 numbers will also probably come up once each, and that'll cost you a total of $5. Ergo, you will net $1, so your Expected Value of that 1 throw of the dice is $0.17. Every single time we make that bet, you can expect to make $0.17, even though you never actually will make exactly that amount on a single bet. But you can't worry about the results of that 1 throw, because you can't control that. You can only control the decision you make with that 1 bet.

This comes up a lot in poker. Poker players play tens of thousands of hands a month, which means that the exact same situations come up a lot, especially stuff like flush and straight draws. Over enough time, the "luck" all evens out and that total EV will converge with your actual winnings. So you train yourself to not be so worried about one individual river card. Of course, if you're on ESPN and you're trying to win the World Series of Poker, the EV calculation changes and maybe you give up a positive EV situation to wait for a better one, since there's the risk of elimination.

You see this more than you think. Nate Silver (who used to post in the same poker forum I used to post in) of FiveThirtyEight uses this a lot (along with a number of other things). After a while, the whole world becomes a series of EV calculations.

So let's see how we're going to apply this to crowdfunding and Perk Distribution. Here's the numbers after 717 campaigns:



After that many campaigns, the average backer amount comes to $95.50, so if you're hoping to raise $15,000, you can expect to have 157.1 backers. Will you have that many? Probably not. You might have more. You might have less. But at the end of the day, this is the best estimate you've got. The rest is kind of easy. 7.15% of 157.1 is 11.2 and so on.

Then, you want to figure out what your perks are going to cost to fulfill. And here I'm just making up some numbers.



Remember, for total EV, your $25 backers are also your $50 backers and your $500 backers and so on. $$ Cost is the cost of fulfilling the perk. $$ EV is just the $$ Cost times the Total EV. Here you should spend roughly $117.64 fulfilling your $5 perk. Again, it might be more, it might be less. But on average it should come in around here.

So you want to raise $15K? Great. First of all, make sure you can actually get the film done for $15K. Then…

Amazon and Kickstarter take, on average, 8%. 8% of $15,000 is $1,200. Now we re-run the numbers for our new goal of $16,200. That takes our perk cost to $492.17. (I'm not going to re-post the image. You're smart enough to figure that out.) Let's call it an even $500. Now you're looking at $16,700. To be safe, let's make our new goal $17,000. That's your actual goal.

Of course, since we're dealing with percentages, everything else moves. Our fees back to Kickstarter and Amazon are now $1360.00 and our perks now cost $516.47, which leaves us $15,123.53 to make the movie. And if you've budgeted the film correctly, that's what you actually need. Had you gone with your original $15K, you would have actually gotten $13,344. I'm guessing your budget is tight enough already without having to cut over $1,600.



Lucas McNelly is a cynical filmmaker who recently spent a year sleeping on couches around the world and has somehow fallen into teaching people how to run crowdfunding campaigns. You can hire him, if you want to. Also, you should follow him on Twitter.

Kickstarter Perk Distribution

As of right now, this is over 500 successful film & video Kickstarter campaigns. It should update as more are added. Perks are grouped, when needed, into the correct bin (i.e. $25 perks include anything in the $20-$35 range).






If you want, I can break this down for you further. Email me (lmcnelly [at] gmail [dot] com) for more info.

Day 4 of Nicolas Citton's DECORATION

This is Day 4. I've yet to see a call sheet. #AYWR

— Lucas McNelly (@lmcnelly) October 29, 2011

There's no call sheet, but call time for day 4 is 9:30am. True to form, that doesn't happen. We leave at 10:12am and head back to Nooner's house to shoot the final day there.

Nooner has no idea we're coming. He thought we were done. So, of course, he's started to put his house back together. Luckily, he's pretty easy-going, so it's no problem to take his house back over.



Just like yesterday, we have to clean the house out completely to shoot the scene, but unlike yesterday, we don't have to re-set it later, other than to put the house back together for Nooner and take our props out completely. Why didn't we shoot the two empty house scenes back-to-back on the last day? I have no idea.

And you know, it'd be easy to go on a rant about this, but I think you see between the lines here.

Instead, let's talk about the crew, because sometimes when the top of the hierarchy isn't ideally organized, that pulls focus from the fantastic work being done by the rest of the crew, and DECORATION has a very good crew.

Today's challenge is to rotate the camera a full 360 degrees on the x-axis as Cheryl Nichols stands on her head. There's gear that does this, of course, but they've got none of it. So, Josh Jones and Stew Yost come up with the idea to try and strap a 5D to a tripod head. This gives them the rotation they need, but takes away access to all the buttons and controls of the camera, so they've got to figure out everything, then set the controls, and then strap it in.



Only, if you don't strap it in correctly, you get a kind of oblong rotation that's less than ideal.

Oh, and they're trying to do it on a tight shot with an actress who's standing on her head, meaning you can't have her sit there for anything longer than a few seconds to line everything up.



Eventually, they come up with a solution that requires a collapsed tripod laying flat on a bed of sandbags (to give it a little bit of height off the ground, thus allowing the rotation). They have Cheryl stand on her head, then make a note of where on the wall that is and where her hands are to establish the base for that shot. Set the frame, then try and repeat the head stand as close as possible to the last one. Then, they have to get a smooth rotation out of it.

It takes a couple of tries, but they get it.



From there, we move down the hill to a semi truck that's been borrowed for a sequence where Rick Dacey climbs on it in a bit of childish wonder. It's a 2 camera shot, one on the ground and one on more of an eye line thanks to a long lens on a hill.





Then it's some car mount driving shots to finish out the day. Only, when we get the camera mounted on the hood, it's moving around way too much for anyone's taste. Enter grip/AC/PA Jimmy, who sticks a empty water bottle under the lens. And you know what? It works. It's the perfect height. A little gaff tape later, and it's set. DP Stew Yost jumps in the bed of the truck to shoot Rick on the other side of the scene, and once they double check to make sure the cameras aren't seeing each other, they're off.



And that's day 4, the second-to-last day of principal photography. All that's left is to shoot the Decoration ceremony. You know, the scene the title comes from.





Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Amir Motlagh's 35 YEAR OLD MAN

A couple of years ago, I ran a failed screening series. The first film we screened was this great feature called WHALE. Well, the director is back with a short, and it's equally awesome.

35 Year Old Man from Amir Motlagh on Vimeo.

Day 3 of Nicolas Citton's DECORATION

We're up for a 9am shoot on a bridge. It's a small scene, meant to exist near the end of the film, so I'm not going to talk about it too much, other than to say we all drove out there and shot a scene near the water. The rest isn't all that important. Nothing complicated. Nothing exciting.



From there, we head back to the cabin we're all staying in for quick turnaround. The word that goes out is "10 minutes". Someone sits down. The TV goes on, and before you know it, we've been watching Skip Bayless talk about Tim Tebow for over an hour.

Skip Bayless really likes Tim Tebow.

I have no idea what the cause of the delay is.



Eventually, we pile in the vehicles and head back to Story and our primary location of Nooner's house. The second unit splits off to shoot some B Unit stuff.

"you can hang back in the van while we block this scene" // "um...ok" #missingthepoint #AYWR

— Lucas McNelly (@lmcnelly) October 28, 2011

As for me? Well, I'm being asked by the director to sit in the van. But, the sun is out and it's kind of warm out, so instead myself and Chris the sound guy find some chairs on the porch and sit there while they block the scene inside. I eat an orange and work on write-ups for other films.

It's not exactly a closed set. The director and actors are in there, of course. As is the DP and the grip and Jimmy, who's a hybrid grip/PA/whatever. Basically, everyone but myself and the sound guy. But whatever. I have work to do.



Eventually, the director comes out and asks if I could take some pictures of the area around the couch for continuity. It's a simple enough thing to do. There's a couch there and a bookshelf with a bunch of books on it. So I take pictures of everything and, as requested, start moving everything out to the porch. I pull the books out in stacks, being careful to keep them in order, the assumption being that we're going to want to reset the scene back to the original configuration. And while a lot of the books and magazines are scattered around the floor and coffee table, they're at least in distinct piles, and those that are on the bookshelf are in a specific order.



It's a little thing, but if you can pull 10 books off a shelf and keep them all together as you move them around, it saves time when you have to put them back. There's no trying to use photos to recreate the order. All you have to know is that this stack goes on the top shelf, over to the left. The rest takes care of itself.

We pull everything, stripping the area completely. But by the time that's finished, the director has gone ahead and done the same with the entire house.

There are no photos for the rest of the house. None.



They film the scene and then we have to reset the house for a night scene. But there's no photos, so when the time comes to see the parts of the house that aren't the general couch area, there's nothing to go by, other than the consensus memory of the cast and crew. Ever tried to remember every little detail about a room? It's not easy. People's memories conflict. Say you've got two framed images of birds. Was the cardinal the one higher up or the bluejay? How sure are you?

And sure it's a small thing, but those things add up. Flip one bird image and whatever. These things happen. But do it over and over again and it starts to pull people from your story. It becomes a drinking game, and when that happens, no one's going to be sober for your emotional third act.



What the production does have is footage from scenes previously shot in the house. But think of how time-consuming that is. You've gotta get out the hard drive and computer, boot it up, and search through all that footage, just to figure out if it was the cardinal or the bluejay on top. And that's a best case scenario. That's if you can find the footage you need, if it's nearby or, say, back in the cabin where everyone's staying.

This is why you get a Script Supervisor, because they'll be damned sure if it was the cardinal or the bluejay. Hell, they'll even tell you if it was hung straight. And it won't take them all night to figure it out.

And if you don't have the budget for the Script Supervisor? Well, then you make sure you get photos of the entire house before you start moving things.




Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Day 0 of Brea Grant's BEST FRIENDS FOREVER

I've never really heard of Marfa, Texas until a couple of weeks ago, but apparently the place is mythical. Everywhere I've been--Wisconsin, Kansas, Arkansas, Dallas, Austin--I keep hearing the same thing: "Oh, you'll love Marfa."

I'm not really sure why.

Marfa is this tiny, tiny town in West Texas. The census bureau has the population at 1,900 people, which seems high. Real cowboy country. They shot THERE WILL BE BLOOD here, as well as NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, and the one thing 1st AC Brian Nelligan (who I picked up in Austin) try and figure out as we drive into town is, where the hell did they put everyone? They shot two decently big movies in the same town at the same time and there aren't exactly a bunch of hotels all over the place. Our theory is that Daniel Day Lewis just camped out near set in a tent that he made himself.

The first thing we notice as we drive through town is that the roads don't match up with my GPS, so it takes a bit of driving around to find the house we're looking for. I call the producer, Stacey Storey, but she's not in town yet, after some sort of issue with the grip truck breaking down on the way from LA. Apparently they're still in Arizona. We start shooting tomorrow.

We find some other crew people, and we all head to a bar to find everyone else. Introductions all around. Brea's there, along with AD John-Michael Thomas and DP Michelle Lawler, trying to figure out how to shoot the first day with a grip truck that may or may not show up on time.

Your first thought is that you'll have to cancel the day, or at least part of it, and no one wants to do that. You put yourself in the hole on day 1 and run the risk of spending the entire shoot trying to catch up. On the other hand, if the truck shows up late, you've got some real chaos on your hands, and that's not the best way to start a shoot either.



Eventually, the decision is made to turn day 1 into a prep day, which feels like the right call. The truck shows up with Stacey and gaffer Phil Matarese already exhausted from driving all night. And the prep time is helpful. Things need to be unloaded and sorted. Plus, it gives the various crew members time to get to know each other a little bit before the actual work starts. An opportunity to ease into things, if you will.



After an hour, we've completely taken over the yard and part of the street, which attracts the attention of a neighborhood cat. He starts looking around for food and before anyone realizes it, he's ripped into a bag of bagels and eaten part of one. I didn't even know a cat would eat a bagel.

No one knows where he came from exactly, but he's apparently been inside the house 3 times already.

Before long, he even has a name: Lonestar Bagels Sebastian III.



Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Day 2 of Nicolas Citton's DECORATION

Call time for my second day on DECORATION is 9:30am. I'm ready to go a little before then, call it 9:20. Call time comes and goes. Nothing happens. And by that I mean nothing. People aren't ready, and why should they be? We aren't moving.

10am comes and goes. People start to emerge. They make breakfast. Get coffee. The director has gone for a walk. It was like this yesterday too, but it being my first day, I chalked it up to an aberration. Now it's looking more like a trend.



When you join a production near the end, there's a period where you try and figure out the pace of things. Every production operates on its own speed (for better or worse) and when you join one mid-stream, there's an adjustment, kind of like merging onto the highway. The more times you do this, the easier it gets, and after a while you can sometimes tell before you even hit the on-ramp.

After a week or so, every production becomes what it'll eventually be, which is to say that things don't change all that much beyond a point. Sure, in the first couple of days, stuff gets addressed and things change, but eventually it all settles into a routine. Very little changes past that point. Crews know that. Hell, they're the first ones to figure it out and adjust accordingly. So if you're on a set and the call is 9:30 and no one in the crew is ready to go at 9:30, that probably means that call time is a myth. Grips aren't giving up a hour of sleep if you aren't going to be ready to go on time. They aren't stupid. A good way to see if something is an aberration or the norm is to see how the crew reacts. Or, you ask them. And then a pause is all you need.



So we finally leave at 11:08am (I know because I wrote it down) after a 9:30 call and head to the police station to shoot the other half of the scene we shot yesterday. This requires a car mount on a police car. Then, we wait while they drive around filming a scene. They come back and we re-mount the camera in a different spot on the car. Nothing crazy complicated, just a question of building the safest thing imaginable with what we've got on hand. The car mount is easy enough, because we've got one of those, but putting the camera behind the back seat is a little trickier. DP Stew Yost settles on a tower of apple boxes and sandbags, with the camera wedged in-between the top 2 sandbags and the director sitting next to it to ensure the whole thing doesn't tip over.





From there, we head over to the tiny town of Story, Arkansas where the house location is. In the story, our two main characters (Cheryl Nichols and Rick Dacey) return home from LA when their father dies back in Arkansas. This is his house, a tiny one bedroom structure on a hill. It's a building badly in need of repair, which makes it a perfect location.

We move some stuff around a shoot a couple scenes, nothing all that complicated. It starts raining and things need to be adjusted accordingly, but all in all, we get everything. We wrap around 6pm.



It's Stew's birthday and someone has bought him a pellet gun. The crew spends the evening setting up empty beer bottles. By morning there's a pile of broken glass on the ground.


Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

And then?

It feels like 10 years ago, but back when I came up with the idea for A Year Without Rent, I was struggling with some major shifts in my personal life, one of them being that I had no idea where in the country I wanted to live. It's a big country and when you're kind of hard-wired to be somewhat nomadic and already kind of floating around, the thought of just picking a place and getting an apartment and a lease and everything is kind of terrifying.

It also doesn't make a lot of sense.

So the thinking was that a year on the road would solidify a lot of things, all the while giving me a chance to scout out the various parts of the country I'd never really visited outside of maybe a layover in the airport.

Surely by then I'd know where I wanted to live.

Well…

You learn a couple of things on the road: 1) Being on the road is kind of addictive. 2) It's also exhausting. Also, living out of your car is a pain in the ass.

Seriously, it sucks.

But what's amazing about it is all the travel, all the people you meet, and all the real cool places you get to go. Think about it. You spend a year going from place to place, never spending more than a week or two in a location, always seeing something different, always experiencing something different. Then pick a spot where you'll spend several months or even several years. Even the idea of it makes my inner Mowgli revolt.

Still, it'd be nice to have a place to put my shit.

A Year Without Rent ends around the 20th of February where it started, in Purchase, New York on a short film by Mattson Tomlin. After that, I'll need to catch up on the mountain of work that'll surely be left. There's SXSW in March that I'll probably go to. Then a couple of films around the country throughout the year that I might be working on. One's in Montana. I'll probably be directing PAID sometime this summer and there's a couple of other things that I can't really talk about yet.

So…yeah. I don't know.

I'll need to find a source of income. I'll need to find a place to spend the times when I'm not going to be on the road. A home base, if you will. And I've got it narrowed down to something like 10 cities.

So I don't know where I'm going to live or what I'm going to do to pay the rent there. I know that when AYWR ends, my first step is to get drunk and pass out. After that, your guess is as good as mine.

Music for UP COUNTRY

Above is the first 1:45 (ish) of my film UP COUNTRY, a feature film shot in northern Maine on the 7D for roughly $4,000. That's not a typo.

We thought we had a composer, but that's fallen through. We're looking for a new one. So if you'd like to take a shot at it, pitch us something using the video above to go by.

The film is the story of 3 people who hire a guide to take them fishing in the woods of northern Maine, then find themselves in trouble when the guide leads them out into the middle of nowhere and takes all their stuff.

As you can imagine, that doesn't go very well.

It's a small film, obviously, but it features great performances from Kieran Roberts, Jonny Mars, and Tyler Peck. And you can get an idea of how beautiful Dustin Pearlman's cinematography is from the clip.

If you have any questions, email me (lmcnelly [at] gmail) or ask on Twitter.

Day 1 of Nicolas Citton's DECORATION

One of the questions I get the most in regards to A Year Without Rent is how it is I find these projects. I've covered it before (even if I am too tired to go look up the links right now), but it never hurts to repeat it, especially when serving as an introduction to a film.



Really, there's 3 popular ways. The first is the most obvious: I already know about the film. Usually this filmmaker is a friend of mine to some degree. This makes everything easier, as there isn't that awkward, "so what the hell are you doing?" stage. That's not to say it's a perfect system, but it's a simple one. The second is a film that submits information on the webpage. This is not as common as you think and sometimes leads to people submitting things that are, um, weird. Like, "they stumbled across the wrong webpage" weird. The third method is the old referral system. Basically, I work on a film with person A and they then call me up to work on project B. That's even easier than the first method, as they know exactly what to expect, as they've seen AYWR in action already.



If you're scoring at home (and I'm not sure why you would be), DECORATION is option 3. You might remember lead actress Cheryl Nichols from her supporting role in Paul Osborne's FAVOR. Cheryl gets my email from Paul, asks if I'd come to Arkansas. I juggle the dates around other stuff, and here I am in Arkansas. See how this works?



Cheryl's new film goes by the name of DECORATION. It is, to quote film's webpage, a film "formed out of necessity, in order to create the work that will outline our careers; in the spirit of experimentation, the pursuit of honesty and the search for a unique voice."

Practically speaking, what that means is that we're making a film in Story, Arkansas. Population: 89. You read that correctly. 89.



Well that's where they've been filming for the past 10 days or so. Today we're in Mt. Ida, a thriving metropolis of a couple of hundred people or so, to shoot a scene by the courthouse and, later, scenes in and around a grocery store.

We get to the courthouse and nearly all the parking spots nearby are empty. So we park a car, set up the camera, and shoot the front part of the scene where Cheryl gets stopped for drinking behind the wheel of the car. It goes pretty smoothly. But that's only the first half of the scene. The rest involves Cheryl's character being put in a squad car by Robert Baker. Only, the squad car the production is borrowing from the local police isn't anywhere to be found.



So, a handful of people jump in a car and go off to shoot something else. The rest of us hang out at the courthouse and watch the sun part the clouds and turn our previously overcast day into a sunny one.

That's not good. It's a bigger continuity issue than you think, bigger than just blue sky verses gray. Clouds provide a soft light. There's virtually no shadows and the light is pretty even, but sunlight is harsh and unforgiving. The shadows are easy to spot. You can shoot in both, of course, but where it gets tricky is when you try and pass them off as the same thing. It's hard to do well.

Plus, I'm not sure what the status is of the squad car.

An hour later, they come back and the decision is made to push the scene until later.





That leaves the scenes at the grocery store, and for those we need to wait for nightfall. First up is a scene in the parking lot where Key Grip Joshua Jones doubles as a supporting actor. The blocking of the scene is pretty simple, all revolving around the bed of a pickup truck, which in an empty parking lot means there's a lot of room to operate. This allows DP Stewart Yost to set up 3 different DSLR's, which obviously cuts down on the amount of takes we have to do.



It makes sense. Almost every shoot I've been on this year has had a DSLR just sitting around, mostly taking pictures of various things. So when you've got a situation where you can actually use it to, you know, get the movie made, why not do it?



Then, we're around the back to film a different scene. We walk by a dumpster that's got a weird blinking red light in a garbage bag. Twenty minutes later, when there's the need for something in the cab of the truck, suddenly we're tearing open a garbage bag for that very light. (Oh don't act like you wouldn't do it)



Finally that brings us inside. It's a couple of scenes, one on each side of of the store and a walk and talk along the back. The walk and talk is the interesting one. The way a lot of people do this is to put the camera on a dolly of some kind (or go handheld) and just stay in front of them. You don't even need to pay Aaron Sorkin any royalties.



Instead, what Nicolas has decided to do is film the scene as a series of shots from about 10 feet down the aisles as they move aisle by aisle, across the store, the camera locked down for each shot.



Meanwhile, there's a second camera more or less freelancing from where the Sorkin camera would be. My guess is they'll cut to that in-between each aisle shot.

At least, I hope that's what they do.





Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.