IndieWorks: July 2014 Recap

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Last week was a good time at PEOPLE's lounge, when we held our July installment of IndieWorks with over 50 people in house. Check out the photos from the event and the awesome winning filmmakers from the evening.

The films of the night:

5AM
In the near future, the fourth generation of service industry clones finds out that they're being recalled.

As You Are Now
Narrative music video.

Ice Cream
A story about murder, mystery, and ice cream.

The Visit
When Esther pays a friend a visit, disagreements about how to spend their time together soon escalate into a much larger conflict. 

Bless Me
A hip, non-religious young woman has an unusual experience at her first Catholic confession. 

Purple 
A young boy's decision to dye his hair purple confuses his parents. 

The awards go to...

At the end of the evening, we announced our winning filmmakers for both Audience Choice Award & Silver Whiskers Award. The Audience Choice Award is voted upon by all those in attendance, and the Silver Whiskers is judged by the CongestedCat Team based on a system rating 8 categories of Story, Dialogue/Writing, Direction, Acting, Cinematography, Sound, Editing, and Production Value. It goes on to screen at our end of year Best of Fest event in April.

For the July 2014 lineup, our winning filmmakers were:
    Audience Choice Award:  "Bless Me" Directed by Christian LaMorte
    Silver Whiskers Award:  "The Visit" Directed by Lawrence Horowitz.

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We finished our thank yous & have some news!

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Hello all our wonderful supporters,

We hope you had a great week. We waited to update because we wanted to finish up all our thank you cat photos and personalized jingles for each of our public supporters, and were finally able to do that today! Hear our final jingle:

I think it's safe to say that I'll be taking quite the break from snapping pictures of my cats. I'm curious to see how long that lasts though. If you missed your thank you photo, you can find it amongst all 111 of them on our Facebook page. You can find yours or any other $50+ supporters' personalized jingle on our Facebook page as well. Kelsey got creative with each and every one, and I've definitely enjoyed listening to all 42 of them. I'm sure you will too!

Also, as promised in my last update, here's our group photo from our celebratory dinner last Friday night. We all had a blast. 

Some more exciting news is that our web series 'Kelsey' has been invited to screen at the Cinema Q Festival in Denver next weekend and Kelsey is being flown there to speak in an LGBTQ Web Series Panel! This is the first of hopefully many screenings and Panels we'll have throughout the next year because we were invited to do a Panel tour of LGBTQ Film Festivals. We'll keep you updated on the progress!

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Lastly, I was interviewed by FilmSyrup.com a couple weeks ago and the Q&A was released this week. Feel free to give it a read if you'd like to know a little more about CongestedCat Productions. 

Thank you all again for your support. We're working hard to make you proud. More updates soon!

Christina

We did it! 120% Success! Thank you!

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Good afternoon to all our amazing Supporters,

 

It's been 2 days since our 120% campaign success and I'm just starting to recover from the whirlwind of emotions that has been this experience. If any of you have ever crowdfunded, you know how hard it is and how it tends to pull you all over an insane emotional scale from start to finish. You expect certain people to support and they don't even reply to your messages, or you don't think someone has the money to support and they come in with an amazing contribution and the most supportive message that just warms your heart. That kind of up and down of disappointment and exhilaration has been what Kelsey and I have been living and breathing for the last month, and it has been quite overwhelming. Luckily for us, we now have nothing to be disappointed by and so much to be excited about and thankful for, most importantly all of you.

To be a little candid and share some of what this experience was like for us, our campaign did not start out as well as we had hoped. Kelsey and I were guaranteed coverage of our campaign on some of the same sites that featured our web series "Kelsey." We were somewhat banking on the idea that a good amount of the fans of our web series would get behind our next projects and fund the biggest chunk of our goal. However, about 2/3 of the fanbase never went on to like the series on Facebook, follow on Twitter or subscribe to our newsletter. They were exclusively watching our episodes embedded on these press sites. We knew they were engaging with the content and us through comments on the site, but didn't give us a way to access them outside of the sites. So, our Plan A for this campaign was to get the press we were promised, see what comes through the fanbase and then assess from there. Because of this, we tried to shape the campaign around the "Kelsey" fans while also making it as inviting as possible for new supporters, and always staying true to the material. However, when we launched, it was implied that we're not gay enough due to the brothers film in our campaign, and did not get the press we were hoping for. As a result, I'm fairly certain that at least half of our series fans don't even know that we were crowdfunding. I'm not going to comment on 'not gay enough' much because I have very strong opinions on the matter that I think make for better discussion than rant. But I will say that regardless of the content we're making, Kelsey, herself not just the protagonist of our series, is out and proud, and that seems 'gay enough' to me and definitely worthy of support by the community. It was just very disappointing to be put in a box in a way, and to have the same aspects that these sites seemingly loved about our webseries (portraying queer characters as 3 dimensional people who exist outside of just the confines of their sexual orientation) then held against us for these short films.

Anyway, I said I wouldn't get ranty, moving on to the positive. What happened then was that we were limited to just the portion of our 'Kelsey" fans that were on Twitter (and Facebook, if we were willing to pay to Boost posts, which we didn't want to do). Thankfully, many of you, our supporters, are in fact "Kelsey" fans that we reached through social media. I'd just like to say that we're so humbled and touched by the fact that you enjoyed our series so much that you wanted to support us in our next creative projects. Thank you for that. We're going to work our hardest to keep giving you content you enjoy! With that said, the majority of you, however, are in some way related to me or Kelsey, through family, friendship or as being part of the same working community. I don't want to speak for Kelsey, but I've spoken with her (extensively, since we talk to each other all day everyday) and I know she relates to all of what I'm about to say. We knew that at some point we'd have to turn to Plan B (which was realistically always part of Plan A) and start sending messages to everyone we ever met in our entire lives to garner support for this campaign. It's the crowdfunding way. But, to be honest, I was hoping that I wouldn't have to do that with literally everyone again because I had done it twice before on Kickstarter, successfully; and I, for the sake of my pride, was crossing my fingers that I wouldn't have to reach out to those same people. But, of course, as many of you know, I did and, because you're receiving this update, you're the incredible ones that without hesitation jumped in and supported. I'm so grateful and just want you to know that I'm well aware of the fact that you've supported my crowdfunding efforts before and now here you've done it again; and this is something I'll never forget. You're my foundation. You're the ones who've been there with me from the beginning and who I'll take with me to every step I grow. And lastly, to the overwhelmingly supportive few who have no relation to us whatsoever, and from what I can tell weren't too familiar with our past work but chose to contribute to us and join our team, we say thank you. The truest thank you you can imagine. We warmly welcome you to our team and hope you'll be sticking around for future collaborations!

To all of you, we will do our best to make you proud of your investment in us and these films, and will make sure you feel part of the process. When I say this is our film, I don't mean mine and Kelsey's or mine, Kelsey's and the CongestedCat team's. I mean OURS, all of you included.

Kelsey, the team and I are going out to dinner tonight to celebrate. It's also sort of a birthday celebration for me, Chris (CongestedCat co-founder) and my fiancé since all birthdays are within 5 days of each other. But we'll absolutely be toasting to the success of this campaign and all the new members of our team! We'll take a group photo to send as an update this weekend.

Next week, we'll be finishing up our social media thank yous and adding our eligible contributors to the films' IMDb pages with their Special Thanks and/or Producer credits: NOLR & WHP. We'll also be holding callbacks for Chris in NOLR, and hopefully will share our final 'Meet the Cast' video by the following week. We've already secured our locations and the rest of our crew. As more progresses with our film, you'll know about!

Have a lovely weekend, 

Christina (on behalf of myself, Kelsey & the team)

P.S. For all the fellow filmmakers who supported us, definitely reach out if/when you need support for your own campaign(s). Also, if anyone would like to subscribe to our monthly newsletter for updates about all our projects and our free film screening series IndieWorks, feel free to sign up on our homepage: http://www.congestedcat.com/

We did it! We got the Green Light!

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Hello wonderful Supporters,

I will write a much more eloquent thank you when the campaign ends 24 hours from now (2:01pm tomorrow), but I just want to say thank you so much for getting us here. We've hit 80% and will get to keep the money we've raised so far. The films will get made and everyone in the crew and cast will be paid! That's amazing and that could not have happened without you, so I send you a million thank yous because Kelsey, the team and I could not be more grateful!

We're hoping to use this last day of our campaign to get as close to our full $20,000 goal as possible so that we don't have to cut corners on equipment or not have a safety net of contingency cash. Please help us with this final big push by sharing the campaign on Facebook & Twitter, and emailing or personally sharing it with anyone who you believe may be interested in our films, our team or our mission statement. Let's make this last day count! 

Tweet of the Day: Less than 1 day left for @CongestedCat Shorts #crowdfunding on @seedandspark! #SupportIndieFilm & get them to 100%! bit.ly/CongestedCatShorts

Thanks again,

Christina

P.S. Kelsey needs to have a jam session & I need to have a photo session with my cats once this campaign is over so that we can finish up our thank you cat memes and personalized jingles! We will try to release all of them by the end of next week. Thanks for your patience :)