Tagged: Kickstarter

Help Launch the only Non-Profit Film Lab in the United States

New York City has a rich history of supporting experimental filmmaking. One major reason is that filmmaking is a collaborative effort, and the city is home to many artists and resources to nurture a filmmaking community. It’s one of the reasons I moved here: if not to produce such work, I was looking forward to being around it.

However, filmmaking has changed dramatically over the last twenty years, and now it’s almost impossible to find resources for making film.

Mono No Aware, a non-profit cinema arts organization founded a decade ago by a cadre of experienced experimental filmmakers, has sustained independent filmmaking in New York since 2006. They are currently nearing the end of their fundraising campaign to start the nation’s only non-profit film laboratory. This will also be, believe it or not, the only film laboratory in New York City.

The campaign ends on December 6. Support independent filmmaking in New York City. Otherwise, the only films made here will be cheesy rom-coms and indulgent HBO series that block access to your home and local bodega.

Contribute to Mono No Aware

Font Awesome, or How to Make “Free” Pay Off

Font Awesome is a font and icon toolkit based on CSS and LESS. Since I redesigned my sites in 2014, I have been using it to display the icons that you see pepper throughout the sites.

The Font Awesome icon pack has been free, but perhaps sensing that free was not a sustainable revenue model, the creators offered a series of subscription tiers for the upcoming version 5.

To raise some initial money, the creators turned to Kickstarter and offered early backers a discounted Pro membership. Their goal was to raise $30,000 to fund development of Font Awesome 5. The crowdfunding campaign ended early this morning, obliterating that goal. They raised over a million dollars. After reaching their initial goal, they set up several stretch goals after reaching certain fundraising milestones. Many of them are a little too technical for me to understand, but the last one in particular is that they pledged to open-source some of their frameworks. That’s pretty cool.

This however didn’t happen by accident. Raising funds of Kickstarter is now a cottage industry, and the guys at Font Awesome were very methodical in launching their campaign, even hiring a professional video production firm for their video.

The result is certainly impressive, and initially I thought they had produced it themselves: “What? These guys can make videos, too!?!” Knowing that they outsourced the video work—and that it cost them like $15,000—makes the Font Awesome guys seem a lot more human.

At the same time, though, their success shatters the myth that crowdfunding is a revolutionary way to raise funds. The Font Awesome campaign is extraordinary, being the most successful Kickstarter campaign to date. But it shows that to successfully raise funds, it helps that you already have funds.

As risky as it may sound to spend $15,000 on a three-minute video, it clearly helped Font Awesome raise a lot of funds. That’s not bad for something that started out as a free product.

A Spectacle in Williamsburg

One of the reasons I was drawn to New York City was the presence of many great places to see movies, especially small independent theaters that are often referred to as “microcinemas.” These are not necessarily repertory houses, such as the Film Society and the Film Forum, although those are great, too. A microcinema screens rare, forgotten, or cutting-edge work that only a small audience would ever want to watch. New York was perfect for that. As I’ve said elsewhere, New York has a thousand things to do and a hundred people that want to do that, too. But as moviegoing and New York City both have changed over the years, many of these microcinemas have disappeared like the video stores that once supplemented one’s rabid cinephilia.

The Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn is one such remaining microcinema. Located on South 3rd Street off Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, it screens a wide variety of offbeat films you probably can’t watch anywhere else (except the Internet), and they screen their films in what looks like a storage room inside a prewar tenement building (except the space was last a bodega).

The Spectacle Theater occupies a former bodega’s space on South 3rd Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (Photo: Ken Rowe / Cinema Treasures.)

Also, they charge only $5 per screening.

As with any financially unfeasible operation, they have taken to Kickstarter to raise some money. The folks behind the Spectacle have somehow secured a ten-year lease on their space and have launched a fundraising campaign to in order make some much needed repairs and improvements to the space.

According to their Kickstarter announcement, some of those improvements will include:

upgrade to a new and better projector and sound system

sound-proof the theater so that Brooklyn’s sirens and screams no longer form part of our films’ soundtracks

install upgraded 16mm projection capabilities (no more tripping over our projectionist extraordinaire John Klacsmann as you enter the theater for 16mm screenings)

install an actual HVAC system so you will no longer swelter in the summer nor freeze in the winter, and we’ll build new risers so that you back-row people will be able to see the screen better

repair our sad-looking floor

redo our facade (but not in a lame way)

I’m as skeptical as they come with many, many Kickstarter campaigns. But this is a good one. If you’re a New York–area cinephile, contribute some money so they don’t have to resort to “raising ticket prices or selling $12 single-origin chocolate bars and açaí bowls,” as they threaten to do in their campaign announcement.