Press release from Blind Spot Pictures
The creators of Iron Sky are about to take a closer look at the crowd funding services available online. Iron Sky is a Finnish-German-Australian scifi comedy with a budget of 7.5 million euros, about one million of which is being gathered through internet audiences. The team is well on their way to reach the goal, since to date they have accumulated about half a million euros in merchandise sales, fan investments, subscriptions to Iron Sky themed fan services and other such sources.
“We strongly believe that crowd funding is going to play an important role in financing films in the future”, says Iron Sky producer Tero Kaukomaa from the production company Blind Spot Pictures. “We have been doing it very successfully just by our own means. There are still some financial hurdles to overcome with post production: the weather wasn’t kind to us in Australia and Germany, which caused some expenses, and we are still missing a part of our budget. So we had this idea: let’s see what kinds of tools there are available online for crowd funding and do a proper test on how they work – and raise money at the same time.”
“I’ve been doing crowd funding for 10 years now, and when we started – still working on my previous film Star Wreck – there were no ready made tools available”, said the director of Iron Sky Timo Vuorensola.
“Now there is a nice selection of handy online services, but how to choose the right one, the service that works for you? Unless you have a background in crowd funding and collaborative film making, it’s hard to make an informed decision. We have both of those qualifications, plus a real film project we can use as a test case. We can kill two birds with one stone: raise funds for Iron Sky, and compile a review that will hopefully help those filmmakers who are considering crowd funding.”
The Iron Sky team is about to launch a crowd funding campaign with the biggest crowd funding platforms out there – Flattr, Interactor, Startnext, Kickstarter, Pozible, Sponsume, IndieGoGo, Rockethub and Verkami. The aim is to reach 50.000 euros in each service by using it in an optimal way. The schedule is tight – each platform has only 60 days, until the end of May, to succeed in the process.
You can follow the progress of the Race to 300k project on the Iron Sky website: http://www.ironsky.net/therace
At the end of the project, Vuorensola will compile the results into a summary to be released later this year.
“I think there’s quite a bunch of filmmakers out there who are wondering what the possibilities, techniques and limits of successful Internet crowd funding are”, Vuorensola says. “I intend to find out, and hope to share my experiences with filmmakers worldwide.”