Crowdsourcing for Look Inside

Last year we began developing Shiona Penrake’s latest short film, Look Inside. We attached the female lead (Lydia Barnes), a DOP (Lorenzo Levrini), an Art Director (Charlotte Meakin) and generally made some progress with budget and logistics.

However, our plans for launching a crowdfunding campaign were interrupted by the day-job demands for many of the key people involved, and it wasn’t until April 2017 we were able to return to the project with the kind of commitment it needs.

So here we are again. And as any of you will know, before you can launch your crowdfunding campaign for a short film (or pretty much anything for that matter), you have to do some crowdsourcing.

If you don’t know what the difference is yet, think of crowdsourcing as the teaser/trailer campaign to your fundraising event, namely the crowdfunding.

Without a crowd of people already taking interest in your short film project, you haven’t much hope of raising money for it during the crowdfunding campaign. So that’s where we are at present.

Our strategy has been to produce a handful of ‘teaser’ videos in which team members talk abut various aspects of the project. Our aim has been to keep to under 2 minutes, not as long as a crowdfunding video, and ask no more of people than that they take an interest and share links, etc.

Crowdsourcing on Social Media  

Wherever we have some social media presence – on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin – we are dropping links to our teaser videos. With Facebook this means doing more than telling immediate friends and people in our own groups – we are joining groups for short filmmakers and talking about the project there.

We’re also reaching out to communities with an interest in bullying, Asperger’s Syndrome and Autism, as the main character in our film is an Asperger type of Alice in Wonderland. We don’t intend the film to be specifically about Asperger’s or Autism, but the film should speak to this group, so we are reaching out to people who understand or have some sympathy with these conditions.

We estimate that we will need to crowdsource for this project for at least 4-5 weeks before we can launch our crowdfunding campaign – really there is no point in launching until we have some sort of ground swell to work with. This will entail varied and daily tweets and updates wherever there is a potential audience on the internet – without, we hope, appearing to spam.

Positive reaction to Look Inside, the script

Everyone who has read the script for Look Inside has been totally spontaneous in giving it the thumbs up. As a writer and producer myself, that’s a pretty rare event – creating a film that speaks to everyone is a tall task, but Look Inside seems to put an instant smile on people’s faces.

So if you’re reading this and would like to get involved, in however small a way, do please share our videos, join our Facebook page and follow us through to the crowdfunding campaign in the summer of 2017.