Today, we’ve launched an on-going crowd-funding campaign on the Patreon platform, which is oriented towards series projects like ours. We’ll be posting updated goals as we go. Our first goal is to raise the estimated $1000/episode that Lunatic will cost us in out-of-pocket cash to keep going (that’s not including anyone’s time, of course). During this first phase, we’re appealing to those of you who have helped us in the past (or tried to!). A new preview will be released on the Patreon page soon, with the updated NPR/anime style and a lot more of the 3D assets that we’ve been developing over the last year.
Thanks to all of you for backing our project, even though it’s clear as the minutes tick down (in fact, it’s honestly been pretty clear to me for a couple of weeks) that we’re not going to make our goal. I could sell you some sunshine about how I’m not unhappy about this, but actually it has in fact been an ego-crushing disappointment . I made some misjudgments about how many people would back us and how far news of our project would travel. I’m sorry about the disappointment that we didn’t make it. It sure would have been better if we had. I have, however, had a couple of weeks to get used to the idea. And we are NOT stopping our production.
We really need some help getting the word out about our Kickstarter campaign, and one of our fans suggested neat idea: if you embed our Kickstarter widget on your webpage until Aug 20th, we’ll send you a free, high-quality printed set of OFFICIAL finger puppets and a signed thank you note. Details after the fold…
We’ve cut a new trailer for the pilot episode project, in response to fan feedback. This one is much shorter and more energetic — hopefully catchier. We’ve also revised the Kickstarter video to start with this 6-second teaser. The old trailer/teaser/demo/short is still available on YouTube and Vimeo, of course.
I was invited to this event to discuss three projects currently crowd-funding, our own “Lunatics!” project, another film project called “Algorithm” , and the huge (and controversial) Ubuntu Edge project (which is aiming to raise $32 million to build a limited run of smartphones running the “Ubuntu Touch” operating system — that’s over 750 times as much as we need for “Lunatics!”). This was a fun chat — the part about “Lunatics!” is mostly towards the end:
Well, I’m not sure what’s happening with our Kickstarter. We’re stuck at 3% with 22 backers. I don’t know i that’s because I’ve overestimated how many people are supporting us or if it’s because you’re disappointed with the results. Could even be I’m just talking to myself and a bunch of web crawlers here, and only imagine that anyone is following this. It could be that even our closer followers aren’t seeing all of these posts, with all the changes that have been happening in the social media sphere. There are so many thing acting to lock you into a digital bubble.
Kickstarter, with its “all or nothing” funding scheme, reduces risks for both creators and backers. For a project like “Lunatics!”, this makes it a lot safer bet. This protects early backers financially — if we don’t make it, you’ve lost nothing. And the money doesn’t come out until the end when we know the campaign has succeeded (or doesn’t because it hasn’t). We really need “inside” support from those of you already following “Lunatics!” if we’re going to encourage the “outside” support from new people we communicate with.
