About a Donkey (Sneak Peek)

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Our second feature film, About a Donkey, is currently in post-production, only 1/3 of the way through the edit. But we want to keep our supporters feeling included in the process of making it! So here's a special sneak peek at footage from the film!

Follow along for updates: seedandspark.com/fund/about-a-donkey#updates.

About a Donkey is about growing up & growing old, and finding love & laughter along the way. The film follows the Owens family: Ann & Tim, their 3 adult children, Cecilia, Burgh, and Annie (and her husband Paul), and matriarch Farrah. When Tim brings home a donkey in a mixture of wanting to rescue both it and himself, things are shaken up in each of the characters' lives.

The film's quirky but relatable nature has been referred to as a little Little Miss Sunshine meets Gilmore Girls, but with a donkey, and a strong focus on inclusion (both in front of and behind the camera)! We're strong believers in being the change -- reflecting the world as we want to see it. With this film, our mission is to combat hate with humor and heart. Our film is made up of an inclusive cast of characters - both within the film and behind the scenes, but predominantly featuring women. In our film, love is love, people's lives and desires are relevant no matter their age, and struggling with depression is acceptable and normal.

New SUMMIT Review & Amazon Update

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SUMMIT being on Amazon now resulted in a brand new review! Based on a pronoun used at the end of the review, it seems the writer either didn't actually understand the reveal he's critiquing or he's making a tongue in cheek comment. (Probably the latter but it's a weird and confusing choice for a review.) Still though, it's mostly positive! "Raia proves herself to be a quick — hell, an immediate — study when it comes to the little things that make a big difference : the various explorations of the cabin that our erstwhile “heroes” undertake are uniformly well-shot and reasonably fraught with tension (even if there’s no real payoff to be had from any of them), the “driving-around-lost” scenes are very nicely-executed indeed, and small, seemingly throwaway plot points are revisited later with near-devastating effect. All in all this is smart stuff that rewards viewers who pay careful attention to even the most minor goings-on..."

In case you missed them, all our past reviews: The Indie Horror Review, Screen Relish, Daily Grindhouse, Life Between Frames, 411Mania, Forces of Geek, and Letterboxd.

In other news, today makes officially 4 weeks SUMMIT has been on Amazon Prime. Amazon's profit sharing is definitely not meant to benefit or create sustainability for the filmmakers at 15 cents per hour watched in the US (& 6 cents internationally), so nothing to be excited about there. BUT there is some legit discoverability. We haven't shared the link beyond telling existing supporters in two updates. It seems the film just gets daily traffic from within Amazon's search features. 

For a no-budget feature with no name/brand recognition, that's pretty cool. Amazon doesn't share extensive data. So we can't tell if that 121,814 minutes watched is 121,814 individual people only watching one minute of the film, 1,522 people watching the entire thing, or somewhere in between. I hope it's closer to less people watching it all though! (We've gotten 5 viewer reviews, so that's at least 5 full watches, haha. I assume more since it's a rare type of person, I think, who chooses to write a review after watching something with no personalized motivation to do so.)

I don't regret releasing it initially on Vimeo on Demand and VHX 2 years ago and driving traffic to those sources. It is very hard to get people to pay to watch one film and we may have only gotten 74 total rentals or sales between the two, but it was basically for everyone who had been anticipating the film for 3 years outside of the 150+ backers who got a free copy via our Kickstarter rewards and the 100+ friends & family who came to our NY premiere. Without a marketing budget, I knew we needed to make the most out of the following we had built through pre-production and the festival run. Releasing it pay per play at first made sense since we made more at 90% of a $2.99 rental or $9.99 purchase than if each of those people just watched it on Prime (which would've resulted in less than 20 cents per view). Now that I and the team have moved beyond wanting to share & promote it constantly, it's nice that it can be discovered by indie genre fans already paying for streaming services. 

I'm curious to see how it continues to do on the platform and on Seed&Spark next month! 

CongestedCat Screening Recap

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Tuesday night we got some of our cast, crew and supporters together for a screening of our latest work from the past year. We rescreened "Hello," and had unofficial premiers of our newest shorts, "Night In, "Arm Bar," and "Enough." Then we presented the first 10 minutes of About a Donkey with a short preview of additional footage from the film. We had over 50 people in house and got an overall positive response to all the films. It was so rewarding getting to celebrate the hard work and talent of our team and collaborators with an attentive audience. We can't wait to share more soon!