Have you ever wanted to travel through Africa and put together a book of emotionally moving images of the people and their culture? Have you wanted to document how children are impacted by the current economic hardship and loss of their home to foreclosure and do a gallery show with large prints? Have you ever wanted to tell a personal story of how corporal punishment in schools was a shock to you when your family moved to West Virginia from NYC and look how this form of discipline is still practiced today? Well one aspiring filmmaker is doing just that. Jared Abrams, who I met earlier this year when we sponsored the DSLR Sand Puc tour, is on a quest to get his documentary “The Board of Education Funded”. What does Jared’s film project have to do with us still photographers? Well Jared is using a great tool called Kickstarter. Kickstarter will allow all of us creatives to find funding for our personal projects.
I’m finally able to share this info with all of you thanks to Jared being very open about the entire process of pitching your project to Kickstarter, getting approval and moving forward with getting funding. Basically Kickstarter allows you to pitch a project to them and if approved, you can use their site to market your job to investors. The best part about Kickstarter is that anyone can back your project. People can pledge as little or as much money as they want for your project. Once your project is “fully funded” the backers have their credit cards charged and your project is funded. There is no risk to the investors since they do not pay if your project doesn’t get enough support. It’s a great process of using social media to fund your project from all over the world. There are still and film projects on Kickstarter and it’s a great tool we can all use for those projects which are out of our personal funding budget. The other great thing is that Kickstarter only selects projects it deems worthy and achievable by the artist, so if you do fund a project you have an added level of security to help ensure that it will actually be completed.
To see how Kickstarter works, check out Jared’s current project The Board of Education
To see a behind the scenes of the entire Kickstarter process, check out Jared’s blog, Wide Open Camera and do a search for “kickstarter”
The Kickstarter site is pretty cool and it’s even gotten me to fund a few projects in the last month or so including The Board of Education. Kickstarter is really a great tool we as artists can all use to personally connect with people who love our work.
We all need to find a way to do projects for ourselves to renew our creative spirit and experiment with new techniques. Good luck with your own personal project!
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