Digital Director: Research Essay

Digital Director: Research Essay

Crowdfunding has become possible due to online technologies and social media platforms. Discuss, using recent film projects, how crowdfunding has impacted the modern media landscape, and whether online audience engagement is integral to a successful campaign.

The media landscape is constantly shifting, opening new avenues to content creation for those willing to follow them. One such avenue is the relatively recent phenomenon of crowdfunding. A fundamentally grassroots concept, a crowdfunded project asks participants to volunteer funds in order to see a vision realised. An increasing number of directors are using online services (such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo) to see their own filmic visions realised, with varying results. While it is clear that the crowdfunding movement offers “many potential benefits…including helping provide access to customers, press, employees, and outside funders” (Mollick & Kuppuswamy), there are also clear pitfalls. The following four case studies of crowdfunded film projects intend to emphasize the importance of audience engagement, and how misjudging or ignoring the audience can lead a campaign to failure.

Lazer Team (Matt Hullum; 2015; USA) is a recent example of just how successful a crowdfunding campaign can be. Developed by the Austin-based Internet production company Rooster Teeth, Lazer Team’s premise is an inherently ambitious one. A science-fiction comedy, heavy on digital effects, steered by a group of web content creators who had never produced a feature length production in their history. Their intent, as John Gaudiosi writes for Fortune Magazine, was to “change the Hollywood distribution model that has remained in place for decades.” Matt Hullum and Burnie Burns, the film’s producers and Rooster Teeth co-founders, spotted the opportunity that more and more content creators are discovering, and tapped into their broad fan base to build the film’s finances. Their immediate success has, according to Gaudiosi, provided “a new model for releasing big-screen films: crowdfunding and crowdsourcing.” Using the international crowdfunding website Indiegogo, Rooster Teeth’s campaign “raised $2.48 million from 37,493 supporters, or four times Rooster Teeth’s goal.” (McNary) These figures, taken from a Variety report, are a testament to the power of the online audience. Burns also addresses a “big fringe benefit” of using a service such as Indiegogo, in an interview with Indiewire. He describes the “built-in marketing aspect” that a crowdfunding campaign provides, and the variety of reputable entertainment news sources that ran stories based on Lazer Team’s campaign backs his statement. Variety, Indiewire, Deadline, The AV Club and FilmInk, among other publications, all ran stories on Rooster Teeth’s record-breaking campaign. Many of them, such as The AV Club’s Sam Barsanti, emphasized their “non-celebrity status” in comparison to the successful campaigns run by Zach Braff and Veronica Mars’s Rob Thomas. This media spotlight demonstrates that while Rooster Teeth’s understanding and communication with their online audience was vital in procuring their funds, the success of the crowdfunding campaign itself translated into wider interest within the international community.

In the modern media landscape, media outlets are clearly paying attention to the possibilities of crowdfunding. While this attention waned during the film’s production process, Rooster Teeth’s potent online following enabled the film to stay relevant, as an unprecedented deal with “Austin-based startup Tugg”, a crowdsourcing service that allows customers to screen obscure films in a theatre near them, made Lazer Team “over $1 million” (Gaudiosi) in pre-sales, becoming “the largest worldwide campaign in cinema on-demand history” (McNary) and generating new media interest in turn. The success of Lazer Team’s crowdfunding campaign will surely herald a new wave of crowd funded, “non celebrity” content. Rooster Teeth’s pre-existing fan base allowed them to reach an incredible amount of money on Indiegogo, but it was the fact that this method allowed them to “work directly with their online audience” (Gaudiosi) that generated the buzz and goodwill that fuelled their campaign. In what will no doubt be used as a model for future content creators, Lazer Team’s crowdfunding was entirely integral to the film’s success, as it not only raised their budget, but provided a personal connection to the product for its fans, in a manner than cannot be reproduced elsewhere.

Another wildly successful story to emerge from the recent spate of crowdfunding campaigns is Veronica Mars (Rob Thomas; 2014; USA). The campaign was an instant success, reaching “$1m of pledges in five hours”, and subsequently becoming “the most-backed campaign in Kickstarter’s history” (John, Guardian). Rob Thomas’s campaign occupies a particularly interesting place in recent media history, because its success was unprecedented to that point. Crowdfunding had certainly already become common in the world of independent cinema, “in 2012, 10% of Sundance films were crowdfunded” (Mollick & Kuppuswamy, p.4). However, the celebrity status of the talent involved, and the sheer amount of money raised by the campaign generated a tremendous amount of interest in the project. Thomas himself contended that with the success of Veronica Mars, there was “the chance that we completely revolutionize how projects like ours get made” (John, Guardian), while WIRED described the popular feeling that the campaign had “even inspired talk that this could change the way films get made.” (Hudson) These media commentators focused strongly on the grassroots funding element, and the impressive statistics that the campaign amassed – “over 91,500 backers who invested a total of 5.7 million dollars” (Booth, New Media and Society, p.16). However, an integral element of the campaign’s success was largely overlooked, to the detriment of later, less successful crowdfunding projects. In examining the successes and failures of various campaigns, Paul Booth describes how in the success stories, “the entertainer drew on specific support from his or her own fan community to generate funds.” (p.3) Here lies the key to what makes a ‘successful campaign’. Booth describes how, in Rob Thomas’s case, “the receptive practices of the filmmakers towards the fan campaign via acknowledgement of fans’ work may have helped spur fans to want to donate to the Kickstarter.’ (p.18) This active engagement with the audience is a vital factor in these campaigns, particularly those driven by content creators with a previously established fan base. Failure to connect with this base, either through miscommunication or a blatantly misguided demographic appeal, can both negatively affect an otherwise financially successful campaign, as well as derail one before it’s even begun, as the next two case studies depict.

A less successful example of a recent crowdfunding campaign exists in the production of Wish I Was Here (Zach Braff; 2014: USA). Unlike Rooster Teeth Productions, Zach Braff has considerable experience in the film and television industry, having starred in a popular US sitcom for a decade, and having previously directed Garden State (Zach Braff, 2004; USA), a well-received independent feature. In 2013, Braff launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, to raise funds for Wish I Was Here, described by the director as a “follow up to Garden State”. Financially, the campaign was a success, raising “$3.1 million of a reported $5.5 million budget” according to Jason Bailey of Flavorwire. However, as Bailey points out, “from a PR standpoint” the film’s production process turned “into a cautionary tale on the dangers of mixing direct fundraising with Hollywood inefficiency.” Despite the amount of Braff’s fans who donated their money to the project, there was a considerable online backlash against the director. Ben Child, writing for The Guardian, asserts that “Twitter users and bloggers subsequently questioned why the actor…did not simply use his own cash to make Wish I Was Here.” The media spotlight settled on the relatively new phenomenon of the online crowdfunding campaign, with a particular emphasis on “the spirit of crowdfunding” (Marks, The Guardian), of which Zach Braff was widely found to be in breach. Lisa Marks’ opinion piece for The Guardian argued that while services like Kickstarter and Indiegogo were “one of the few ways that a truly independent artist can fund their project”, Zach Braff’s ability to “hijack” the process proved “the system is compromised”. Compared with the success of Rooster Teeth Production’s Lazer Team, built around their willingness to work with their audience, Braff’s campaign was something of a disappointment. On the occasions when the director did choose to reach out to individual backers, his attempts appeared to backfire, resulting in further negative media attention – he “whines”, Bailey contends in a description of one such exchange, describing Braff as “[climbing] up on the cross that’s he nailed to himself.” (Bailey, Flavorwire). Paul Booth contends that, compared to Rob Thomas’s success in dealing with fans on the Veronica Mars Kickstarter, “Braff distances himself from the fans, using less-inclusive language” (p.20). Given that the question posed is whether or not crowdfunding is integral to a successful campaign in the modern media landscape, Braff’s pre-production saga raises an interesting point. While his crowdfunding was a resounding monetary success, the campaign for Wish I Was Here was “a PR nightmare” (Bailey), a nightmare that is directly attributable to Braff’s decision to utilize Kickstarter, while simultaneously setting himself apart from his fan base. The mere introduction of crowdfunding into a film campaign isn’t a sure means of success. The success of Lazer Team and Veronica Mars demonstrate the true value of understanding and engaging with an active online audience, and in this sense, Braff seems to have stumbled.

The final case study is Melissa Joan Hart’s failed Kickstarter project, Darci’s Walk of Shame. While one could argue that Zach Braff’s PR campaign was something of a failure, Hart’s project had to be cancelled, “after raising only $51,605 from 315 backers in a little over a month.” (Martinez, The Daily Dot). Hart had hoped to raise $2 million. Hart, like Braff, had been inspired by the success of Veronica Mars, but could only manage a small percentage of that film’s funding. In this specific case, crowdfunding cannot be called integral to a successful campaign, because despite a detailed pitch from Melissa Joan Hart, the campaign folded off the back of a lack of funding. Hart’s failure is another example of how it is online audience engagement, not crowdfunding itself, which is integral to success. Rooster Teeth Productions and Rob Thomas both identified their respective fan bases and pitched exclusively to them, and while Braff made errors in the manner of his address, he still identified and pitched to his long-standing fans. Hart, however, “did not appeal to her fan base in the same way.” (Booth, p.20) Instead, Hart, the former star of a teen sitcom, pitched the film as a “sexy, screwball, adult, romantic comedy”, going so far as to specify there’d be “no magic. No black cat.” (Hart, Kickstarter). Unlike Thomas, who traded in on his fans’ appreciation of his previous work, and Braff, who made direct references to his long stint on a former TV series, Hart deliberately attempts to distance herself from her work, and in doing so “she distances herself from her fan base” (Booth, p.20). Melissa Joan Hart’s failure where others had succeeded is telling, and again emphasises the need to identify and engage with an online audience when choosing to take on a crowdfunding campaign.

Crowdfunding campaigns are marking a clear shift in the media landscape. An ever-increasing amount of filmmakers are taking to the Internet to market their projects directly to an audience, rather than a studio. By subverting the classic distribution model, power is being placed in the hands of content creators, which can only be a positive thing for the industry. However, that power is also being channelled to the online audience, whose funds are the basis for the crowdfunding movement. In a study of Kickstarter projects, it was found that “for those campaigns that did not succeed, generally people felt that market size and marketing were the largest causes” (Mollick & Kuppuswamy, p.11), highlighting how integral it is to, again, identify and engage directly with the audience. In a landscape that is growing more and more dependent on the power and sway of social media, that ability to successfully engage is vital.

Bibliography:

Gaudiosi, John. “How Rooster Teeth’s Lazer Team Bypassed Hollywood”. Fortune. N.p., 2016. Web. 2 Apr. 2016.

Bernstein, Paula. “How They Funded It: Rooster Teeth On Making Crowdfunding History With ‘Lazer Team'”. Indiewire. N.p., 2016. Web. 2 Apr. 2016.

McNary, Dave. “‘Lazer Team’ Scores $1 Million In Presales For Tugg Screenings”. Variety. N.p., 2016. Web. 2 Apr. 2016.

Mollick, Ethan R. and Kuppuswamy, Venkat, After the Campaign: Outcomes of Crowdfunding (January 9, 2014). UNC Kenan-Flagler Research Paper No. 2376997. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2376997 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2376997

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Biggest Ever Crowd Funded Movie Gets Red Carpet Premiere In Aus”. FilmInk. N.p., 2016. Web. 2 Apr. 2016.

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