When Crowd Funding Is A Matter Of Faith | 045 - Actors Talk - Come Inside The Acting Business

Crowd Funding From A New Perspective

ATP Episode 45 is jam-packed. The main focus of Episode 45 is my interview with filmmakers Susan Shearer and Christopher Shawn Shaw about their new faith-based short film project FAMILIAR SPIRITS. Before getting to the interview I have a phone message to share from writer-director Ron Newcomb, a former guest on the show, who called with some exciting distribution news for his film Rise of The Fellowship. I also share a call from writer-director Joe Graceffo, the winner of the MASTER SHOTS VOL 3 book courtesy of Michael Wiese Productions. Joe was the first to leave me a voice mail requesting the book and letting me know about his new short film, Chance Reunion. Lastly I want to let you know of my appearance on This Week In Acting with host James Delong. If you want to see me on the 'other side of the mic' for a change, check out this terrific new show.

FAMILIAR SPIRITS IS...

a Supernatural Drama with a Thriller twist. Our Biblically based film addresses the Supernatural and aspires to compel people living in the here and now to consider their own soul's fate in the hereafter. "Familiar Spirits" is an intimate tale of tragic loss and bittersweet hope. A widow dealing with the loss of her only child is forced to make a tough decision . . . will she dare to ask the question that might take her daughter from her forever?

The past year has been spent in fine tuning it, getting feed-back from professional script consultants, rewrites, having a Table Read at CBS Studios before a live audience for their reactions, more rewrites and here we are today.

Crowd Funding Faith

This episode of Actors Talk features my interview with SoCal screenwriters and filmmakers Susan Shearer and Christopher Shawn Shaw. The topic of the day is their faith-based suspense thriller FAMILIAR SPIRITS. You read that correctly, faith-based suspense thriller.

I seem to be on a 'suspense thriller' roll here on the podcast as the previous episode featured my interview with actor-writer-director Michael Crabtree about his indie suspense thriller ODD MAN OUT, an excellent film that had a somewhat different target audience.

FS FaithLauncher Pitch Video QTC from Familiar Spirits on Vimeo.

What are Crowd Funding Success Rates

Unless you've been under a very big rock, you know at least something about Crowd Funding. You almost certainly know something about Kickstarter or Indiegogo. Perhaps you've contributed to a campaign to fund a film or build a better mouse trap. Perhaps you've tried to fund your own project that way. If so, were you successful?

According to published reports the success rates for these two leading crowd funding sites are A.) not bad and B.) pretty dismal. That's not bad for Kickstarter which fully funds approximately 44% of its projects. And it's pretty dismal for rival Indiegogo which reportedly fully funds less than 10% of all campaigns started there. Ouch.

So at best, the crowd funding prospects on the top two sites are less than a 50/50 proposition. Can these odd be improved?

Crowd Funding To A Targeted Audience

FaithLauncher is an online faith-based crowd funding platform created for Christian inspired projects; we call them Faithdoers. Christian Filmmakers, Musicians, Artists, Entertainers, Ministry Leaders, Entrepreneurs and other Faith based projects can bring awareness to others with similar values to help raise the funds they need to get their project off the ground.

Clearly there is a demand for crowd funding services but just as clearly there is room for improvement in the process. That's what makes FaithLauncher, a newer rival to Kickstarter and Indiegogo at least worth a serious look.

How is FaithLauncher different from the more famous options? The obvious way is what you might call target marketing. Now, narrowing the focus or 'targeting' and the apparent 'scatter shot' approach ...