Summit
We unveil the Official Poster for SUMMIT!
We begin festival submissions at the end of this month, but right now we're still finalizing tweaks to the sound design, and getting our Press Kit ready. We've launched a brand new website for the film. It's still a work in progress, but feel free to scroll through it.
Christina was invited to write an article for Seed&Spark.com about her experience crowdfunding for the third time (successfully), and some of the challenges and surprises she experienced with her latest campaign. She ended up writing a piece about how she realized why crowdfunding it so much more than just raising funds and why she's happy she made the switch from Kickstarter to Seed&Spark despite two successes on the former platform. Give it a read on their site or on ours below.
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One of the most, if not the most important factor in crowdfunding is to know your audience and where to find them. But many people who have crowdfunded will tell you that a good chunk of your money will come from friends and family, the people who watch and support your work no matter what, especially if it’s your first campaign. As someone who had successfully crowdfunded twice before, relying mainly on friends and family, I knew that heavily targeting my audience was going to be the only way I wouldn’t have to lean on them again for my third campaign.
When Kelsey Rauber and I decided not to continue our web series “Kelsey” and crowdfund for two new short films instead (CongestedCat Shorts), we knew we had a bit of a challenge on our hands. The audience we had accumulated was not necessarily the target audience for these shorts. The shorts are companion pieces about siblings dealing with loss and letting go— one about two brothers, the other two sisters. Going from “Kelsey,” a 10 episode comedic web series about the romantic life of a lesbian and her best friends, to two intimate dramas about siblings (one of which featured two heterosexual brothers) was a bit of a stretch. We knew it would be a tough sell to our “Kelsey” fan base, which was quite vocal about just wanting more of our web series.
But Kelsey and I were not creatively satisfied just giving them more of the same. We plan to collaborate on a feature in about two years, so in the meantime we wanted to flex our creative muscles on a smaller scale with a genre and style of storytelling we had not yet explored.
We also wanted to see how many fans of something we had already done we could get to follow us to our next creative endeavor. So we set out to make $20,000 for these two shorts, in spite of this challenge.
Our first plan of action was to release a video for the fans of the series explaining that the campaign was coming and why they should be part of it. We then reached out to the press we got for the series with the same video. Despite receiving generally positive responses from them, I suppose here is where we should have seen a flaw in our plan: the press sites did not share our fan video the way they had shared our episodes. At least two-thirds of our fans that were watching exclusively on those sites were not aware of our coming campaign. However, we did reach some of our fans— we estimated around 1,000 of the series fans had seen the video through our social media and were anticipating the campaign. For this reason, we tailored our campaign to fans that already knew our series and us (though we of course made sure our pitch would grab newcomers as well).
I’m not going to go through every step of our campaign, don’t worry, but I will say that we had prepared the usual stuff that you should have prepared before your campaign: email lists, phone numbers, press releases, etc. We set weekly milestone goals and had contingency plans should some of our marketing ideas not work. Little did we know that we’d lose our Plan A almost right out of the gate.
I wrote about this in a recent update to our Seed&Spark supporters and followers, but the basic idea is this: Kelsey and I were denied coverage on all the sites where we had gotten the majority of our 250,000+ “Kelsey” episode hits because our shorts were “not gay enough.” It was a disappointing thing to hear from sites that had spent months raving about our work, but we had to let it go and figure out how we would make this campaign successful without the press we were anticipating. Accepting this reality, we changed the language of our logline and focused a little more on us as a creative team worth supporting outside of the context of our series. We used “Kelsey” as a tool to pull in new supporters of us as collaborators, rather than targeting existing series fans. We still reached out to the 1,000 series fans we had access to via Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, but were surprised and ultimately disappointed to find that despite getting encouraging replies from many, only 4 actual fans (no relation to me or Kelsey prior to watching the series) contributed money.
This halted our plans to release enticing “Kelsey” content, such as excerpts from our originally intended series finale script or a contest in the last week that involved Kelsey’s love interest on the series and one of the sisters of CongestedCat Shorts, Lauren A Kennedy. We switched over to highlighting our mission statement as a company and team overall, and did more grassroots outreach, like attending the NYC Pride Parade and convincing our location owner to loan our location in exchange for the credit and prestige of being a producer (he’s also just a really generous guy).
So if our supporters were not pre-existing fans of our series, who were they?
With, Summit, my feature film that I crowdfunded for $12,000 on Kickstarter two years ago, I relied quite heavily on the genre. It’s a horror film, and when horror fans hear horror, they’re in. That’s all it takes. They’re like, “Sign me up, I want to see this get made because I want to watch it.” Don’t get me wrong, that campaign was incredibly hard to make successful and is still one of the most stressful but rewarding experiences of my life (only really beaten by the experience of actually making the film). But it was easy targeting the film’s audience, getting press on the many horror blogs and sites, and just generally attracting strangers to the campaign. The CongestedCat Shorts campaign required a little more finesse in getting people’s attention and standing out from the crowd of character-driven dramas that make up indie film. We managed to reach some historical indie film supporters via twitter to the tune of $10-$50, but only a handful.
With this Summit experience and having crowdfunded once more before that, I knew damn well that you must reach out to everyone who is currently or has ever been in your life. As I stated earlier though, I wanted to avoid reaching out again to many of them precisely because I had done it before. But, when I got over the series fans not contributing (and my bruised ego), I set out, personally reaching out and messaging people. And that’s where the campaign really hit its stride, sparking an epiphany.
I haven’t talked about Kelsey Rauber’s involvement too much because I’m trying to focus on my experience crowdfunding again, but having Kelsey as a partner as committed and passionate as I was, and who had an untapped network— having never crowdfunded before— heavily benefited the CongestedCat campaign. Over a fourth of the money we raised came from her family and friends. That said, an overwhelming amount came from past Summit supporters, most of whom were not related to me in any way. This was the biggest surprise.
During the Summit campaign, about one-fourth of our backers were total strangers. Some were frequent crowdfunding supporters from Twitter or Kickstarter and some were genre fans. What I remembered finding interesting about these people was that almost all of them went on to follow my progress with the series (“Kelsey”). They were taking an interest in my other work, not just Summit. Because of this observation, I made the incorrect assumption that people who were following “Kelsey” would also follow my future work. This was the case for a few, sure, but as our 4 out of 1,000 experience shows, it wasn’t true for most.
When I finally gave in and started sending messages about CongestedCat Shorts to people who had backed Summit, I was pleasantly surprised to find that many were happy to give again; it’s very telling that the majority of people who funded this last campaign were the same as those who funded the first. And most gave even more! Those who gave $10-$25 to Summit were giving $50-$100 to CongestedCat Shorts. I didn’t understand it. They were people who supported Summit because they liked my pitch for that film or were intrigued by my spin on the genre. Why were they immediately onboard for these shorts, and why were their contributions bigger? They hadn’t even received Summit yet. It’s still in post; and while I have been blogging about every step of post-production with visual content included, I have not yet delivered on the product they initially funded. This is part of why I was hesitant to reach out to them specifically, friends and family included. However, I learned that they were exactly who I should have been reaching out to in the first place. They had been watching my progress with that film very closely for two years, and it was clear to them that the product is going to be finished and that my team and I had been working hard to complete it to get it out in the world. That was enough to assure them that I’d deliver not just on that promise, but on this new one as well. The general consensus I got from many was that it didn’t really matter what I was making. They were supporting me and my work because they had enjoyed watching my progress since crowdfunding Summit, or even since my short three years ago, and wanted to continue being part of my progress and success. This was overwhelmingly humbling and encouraging, and definitely not something I expected.
The biggest surprise that came from a Summit supporter was a guy who had given $250 to that campaign without any relation to me or anyone I knew. He didn’t even leave an email address on Kickstarter, but I knew he had been receiving and reading my updates on the film. During crowdfunding for CongestedCat Shorts, I tracked him down on Facebook, sent him a personalized message not expecting much, and was shocked that he proceeded to give $1,000 toward Crew & Cast payments without blinking an eye.
What I realized, when comparing the couple hundred Summit supporters to the thousand “Kelsey” fans we reached, is this: when you engage and build a following before you make the content, that audience is connected to you as a creator, as opposed to the content itself. We had a huge amount of success with “Kelsey,” and although we made efforts to build a following while we were in production, almost all our viewers connected with the series after we had already released the pilot and received critical acclaim. We knew that the majority was watching exclusively on Lesbian-oriented sites that had embedded the episodes. Therefore, most of those fans were not engaging with us, our brand, or our social media presence. The realization I had during this campaign was that our audience was connected with the series itself; so when it finished, they were finished with us because they never felt connected to us as a creative team. I believe this is what makes crowdfunding so much more important than just securing funding. The people who become part of making your project are the people who will follow you to your next one. I intuitively felt this before but had not had the opportunity to really witness what it meant, nor had I experienced the stark difference between a following gained in pre-production versus one gained post-release until this campaign. We self-funded “Kelsey” and did not have an avenue to build a following around the series early on. This early following is an inherent aspect of crowdfunding, as is that following’s attachment to the creative team rather than just the end product.
I don’t mean to discredit the idea that your existing work benefits your ability to raise future funding; I’d be lying if I said our success with “Kelsey” didn’t play a role in our successful campaign. Our two biggest surprises of this campaign were largely due to “Kelsey.” One was when one of those 4 contributing “Kelsey” fans, arguably our biggest fan, gave over $1,500 and became an Associate Producer. The other was when a total stranger came along in our final two hours and decided to give us $5,000 (taking us to 120% of our goal) because our pitch and past content (“Kelsey”) won him over, probably making the Executive Producer credit more enticing as well. That one still blows my mind. They both do. To have someone enjoy our content so much and feel dedicated to us as a creative team enough to fund our new work is just the best feeling an artist could hope for.
However, I think that this conclusion is valid and, moreover, an argument for crowdfunding to be a sustainable aspect of indie film. If not clearly valuable for the creative strings-free funding, it should be prized simply for its audience building potential. This is why I’m very happy I made the switch from Kickstarter to Seed&Spark. Despite success on that platform, I felt like something was missing. On Kickstarter for Summit, I had 207 Backers and 1,253 people had “Liked” the campaign page. But those likes did nothing for me because “Likers” are not Followers on that platform. They may have taken an interest in the campaign but after they liked it, it disappeared from their lives. They’re not receiving updates from the project, nor am I, as the campaign owner, able to see their names. Seeing that number and not being able to reach them in any way was worse than not knowing how many people had gone to our campaign page and taken an interest at all. On CongestedCat Shorts, however, we have 141 Supporters & 175 Followers, with the latter number increasing everyday since our campaign ended. While the quantity of people that took an interest is not comparable, the quality blows Kickstarter out of the water —those Followers are actually receiving my updates and are becoming part of the making of the film(s), even if they didn’t make a monetary contribution. It’s wonderful being on a platform that emphasizes community building in the crowdfunding process and enhances this ability to engage an audience early on, allowing them to follow you to your new work. I’m now really looking forward to this opportunity to bring old and new followers along to my next big project and beyond.
Compare this coloring to some of the raw file shots in this Album!
Color in this film is very key to the way you as a viewer are meant to experience it. That's of course true of every film, but Summit in particular because I wanted the film to start out very vibrant and Hollywood-Slasher-esque, then make a slow but dramatic shift in the color tone as the narrative turns away from the formula the viewer is probably expecting and becomes something a little deeper and a lot more 'indie.' I'm obviously being kind of spoilery here, but if you've been following this film from the beginning as many of you have then you've already been spoiled quite a bit. I will, however, avoid showing you some shots in the comparisons I'm about to do because I still want the film to surprise and intrigue you visually when you watch it for the first time!
One of the most interesting things about our Teaser is that I had Anna, our colorist, color it separately before completing the film rather than coloring the film and pulling the shots from it for the teaser. I did this because I wanted the teaser itself to reflect this progression from a warmer, more vibrant Hollywood look to a colder, more intense look the way the film flows. However, the shots from the teaser may not actually be in the order they appear in the film and are not all pulled from the same emotional/narrative moment like I want you to think when watching that teaser. So, what I've done is pulled Stills from all the shots in the teaser and pulled the matching Stills from the original raw, uncolored cut for comparison.
Original
Teaser
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We shoot images in a cinematic mode on our cameras that flattens the image. The information is all still there for the colors, but shooting it flat allows the colors to be pushed in various ways in post-production.
Now seeing some of those same stills from the actual cut of the film should interest you because you can see how the color temperature is much colder in the film itself compared to the teaser.
Actual Film
Actual Film
Actual Film
Actual Film
Actual Film
The same footage could have many different looks, both subtle and drastic. That's the beauty of well lit shots and good color grading (or rather, that's the beauty of my DP John and Colorist Anna).
I don't want to show all the shots from the teaser in their actual film versions because doing so would maybe allow you to place them chronologically within the film and spoil some fun for yourself. But I will definitely include before and after Stills with commentary as part of a DVD or Digital Download Special Feature.
Actual Film
One interesting point I will bring up, though, is the fact that I found the color correction process to be so interesting because of the variety of choices I was given. There were times where I was torn between the most aesthetically pleasing image and the one that most represented where we were at emotionally in the story. Take for instance this shot. If you compare this to the one from the teaser, it's arguably less flattering. The teaser version is a sharper, more striking image. It's more stylized. It's maybe more exciting and pleasing to look at. I believe it's definitely more eye catching. However, the coloring of the shot in the teaser does not work narratively for this particular moment within the actual film. Ultimately, it's about choosing what best elicits in the viewer what you're trying to say. It's about looking at the bigger picture of a scene and not at the shots or moments individually. Having never made such a long film before, especially one where I chose to make the color tone(s) such an integral part of the viewer experience, I was not expecting to have so many subtle choices with the color. It was fun to do scene by scene but also required me to step back and think of the film as a whole. I had to try to avoid falling in love with any particular look of any particular shot (like the one above in its Teaser version) because, when you come down to it, it's all about what most effectively tells the story. This is something I've definitely learned more through running IndieWorks because I often see films where I think the filmmaker(s) chose the most beautiful look for shots, but maybe not the most viscerally effective. Finding that balance is key, I believe.
Lastly, I know I haven't released my Shooting Summit "journal" yet (wanted to take a break from it to edit before releasing to the public, as well as time it for festival buzz), but you will eventually be able to read it and see that I spent the second half of production obsessing in my head about whether or not one key scene would come together in post-production or completely break the film. That key scene was a daylight scene that involved all 5 characters and a hefty amount of coverage throughout the scene. The problem was that we had a beautiful, bright sunny day out, which is film, especially indie film, hell. It made getting consistent shots impossible because the sun kept moving, creating shadows everywhere. I feared that when cut all together, the lighting would be ridiculously inconsistent and wondered if it would completely pull viewers out of the emotions of the scene. A year later, while writing Shooting Summit, I still did not know the answer to that question because I was still looking for a Colorist. It was good that I didn't know because it allowed me to stay in that headspace for writing. However, I'm very pleased to say that, although I can not prove it to you by showing you shots or footage just yet, it did work out in the end. Anna made it all look unbelievably cohesive. I'm so grateful to her for that and to John for working with the light despite his preference not to and making sure it could all come together in the end. And while I'm at it, I thank Peter, Charlotte, Erin and Adnan, who all helped with lighting & camera on set that day and all the days. But since I'm talking color for this post, I'd like to plug Waffle-Media, the company Anna runs for her post-production services. I definitely recommend hiring her/them.
As for the rest of the film, the visual effects should be done by the end of this month. That's very exciting! After the effects, title design and animation will be the final visual step for the film. We're still working on a logo redesign to make it a little more unique and tailored to how it will appear within the film. Our score is a bit of a hold up because I keep going back and forth with Colin, our composer/mixer. But he's doing an excellent job and I believe he has a good handle on what I want now. So, I anticipate having the score and sound mix done by the end of June, which would put the entire film in the can in July. That's perfect because our first festival deadline is in August!
Then, it's months and months of waiting to hear back from them. So much work has gone into this film in the last year; it's going to be crazy getting to the point where it's literally just waiting. But I can't wait for it. It'll be such a relief. Even if it is a series of rejections, I'll know that we finished the film, put it out there and are that much closer to being able to share it with all of you. So please stay tuned for more updates. We've got some cool stuff on the way, like the reboot of our website, some new 'Questions with the Cast' videos we shot a couple months back, the release of Shooting Summit and even some sneak peeks at scenes from the film! This Summer and Fall will be full of exciting content and news.
Thanks for all the patience, support and faith in me & my team,
Christina
Read my last post about the process of making our Kickstarter Trailer >
We can't say enough how much this project means to all of us on the CongestedCat Team. So many amazing things came along with the production of our first feature-length project: new friends, new challenges, new opportunities... This was a passion project of ours from the heart, and we're thrilled to bring it to you, our friends and film-family. We're still working on the film itself (color correction & score) but the teaser is ready for your viewing pleasure. The official full-length trailer will follow in a few months.
Five friends travel to Vermont for an end of college ski trip. When they end up at the wrong location and can't backtrack because of the intense cold and secluded surroundings, they decide to take shelter in an abandoned house overnight. But when they wake in the morning, things are suddenly not quite what they seem and it's too late to turn back.
Shot in January 2013. Beginning festival submissions in Spring/Summer 2014.
Updated website coming soon. For now, find out more on the Summit page and here on our blog.
*Compressed Version. Shot on Canon C300.
Today is the one year anniversary of what was the last day of principal photography for Summit. We ended up wrapping just after 6am on February 2, 2013.
The very last shot of production
During the past 2 weeks, the anniversary of production, I decided that I would write a kind of director's journal reflecting on the experience of making my first feature. I had planned to write about each day on set, from my perspective, and share each post on its pertaining day's anniversary. But I ended up writing more than I expected and sharing more about how I felt than I originally intended. It turned out to be quite a cathartic experience and I ended up chronicling 15 days in over 35 single spaced pages. So I've decided that I will still share it but not as daily blog posts, as originally intended; rather as one concise story, "Shooting Summit," that I will release as a PDF for download on the Summit and CongestedCat sites at a later date. I hope that it will be helpful to other no-budget filmmakers making their first features, and maybe act as a “you're not alone” piece for other filmmakers who have first feature 'horror stories' of their own. I also hope it offers an interesting look behind the scenes for fans anticipating the film and all the people that first supported us when we began pre-production and crowd funded the film in 2012.
The 16 days spent in Massachusetts making the film were the most stressful & exhausting but also most rewarding & productive days of my life. I cannot be more grateful to those who supported the film in pre-production, but especially to my crew & cast who stood by the project in the worst of conditions and helped me turn a dream into reality. I could not have done it without you. Thank you all again.
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As an update on the progress of the film as a whole, there were a few exteriors of the car driving on snowy roads that we never got because of time constraints and the loss of snow at the tail end of production. So, John (my DP), Peter (1st AC), Andrew (I'll call him a PA but he wore a hell of a lot of important hats on set), and I drove back up to Canaan, NY last Saturday (January 25th) to get those shots. It was freezing and brought back some of the trying memories of the year before. Our bodies remembered this cold; it all came rushing back. It was pretty brutal. However, it was still a successful and fun day, full of unexpected surprises; just like last year.
We had run-ins with the local police twice, though surprisingly not when we climbed up on a billboard to get this shot.
One of the run-ins involved getting pulled over on the Taconic Parkway. The police officers were doing this good cop, bad cop routine but eventually decided not to give us a ticket. As it turns out, one of them has a son who wants to be a filmmaker, and the good cop spent a lot of time asking about cameras and editing software. Then he asked for my business card, and wished us luck. (I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that this encounter was peak privilege that I have and probably would’ve played out very differently if the 3 men in the car with me were not white.)
The day felt a little bitter sweet because it was exactly the kind of day I wish we had everyday last year; overcast and snowy. The new footage ultimately works really well for filling in the moments that I want in the film but also accentuates, in my eyes, what we could have had but did not for certain scenes last year. Regardless though, I am grateful that we managed to have snow on the ground for all exterior scenes of the film and that, in the end, everything did work out.
I'm proud of the film and the fact that we managed to make it on nothing but a shoestring and a dream. I'm excited that it is in its final stage, which includes color correction, sound mixing and scoring; and I cannot wait to share it with you. Unfortunately, we have a long road of festival submissions and replies ahead of us, which will likely include many rejections but hopefully some great acceptances. In the meantime, we've got our official teaser premiering in less than 2 weeks, a new website coming in April, some fun behind the scenes videos with the cast coming in May, and before you know it, the film will be fully accessible to you.
Thank you again for all your support in the making of this film!
Christina