Star Trek Luminaries Behind the Fastest Funded Film Project On Kickstarter 158
An anonymous reader writes "Legendary sci-fi writer Marc Zicree (Star Trek, Babylon 5, Sliders) and special effects wizard Doug Drexler (Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica) are behind the fastest funded film project on Kickstarter. They're using crowd-funding website kickstarter to directly communicate with and enlist the support of fans for their latest project Space Command. Maybe with direct communication, sci-fi fans can rest easy and not have to worry about their favorite shows being cancelled like FireFly."
Re:Writers that don't own the show (Score:5, Interesting)
That would work only if the writer actually owns the copyright in the show's setting. If the publisher owns it, and the publisher wants it canceled, no amount of crowd funding is going to bring it back.
I think what they mean is that this project is not beholden to a publisher.
Re:Sci Fi Luminaries? (Score:5, Interesting)
I hope they succeed, but... all that talent, and they couldn't think of a name better than "Space Command?"
Given the 1950s atmosphere in all the concept art, I'd guess that's deliberate.
Re:Am i just too stupid to understand kickstarter? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't understand kick starter. If you fund a project you don't get any shares and don't get to share in the profit...
Kickstarter would absolutely love to be able to allow users to offer a share in profits in return for funding. However this is prevented by all the regulations around public ownership of companies. Recent (or in-progress?) rule changes will substantially lower the compliance bar for small investments in small companies--whether the regulations will be relaxed enough to allow Kickstarter projects to offer shares, I don't know.
Re:Am i just too stupid to understand kickstarter? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't understand kick starter. If you fund a project you don't get any shares and don't get to share in the profit, and if the person leading the project blows all the dough on ale and wenches you can't interject any authority right?
Sounds like its for suckers sorry. Why not find a bright young person and partner with them to try and get something great done? Is it just because kick starter is easier to fire and forget some cash on?
I have coughed up $$ to 4 different projects on Kickstarter and don't regret any. One of them is the TouchFire flexible iPad keyboard. I thought it was kind of neat and since I own an iPad2 and an Apple KB, it appealed to me personally.
Another project involves some local folks in my area, so again, I had a personal interest. A side note is that a brief talk with the project director led to me getting directly involved. I'm jazzed, they're pleased, and it was unlikely to have happened without the Kickstarter catalyst.
So from my POV, this is a great idea!
Re:Am i just too stupid to understand kickstarter? (Score:4, Interesting)
Kickstarter is not about investing.
Kickstarter is somewhat about supporting a project you believe in.
Kickstarter is mostly about buying a product. Most successful projects offer a 'reward', a product, for the 'pledge', payment, by the 'backer', customer. Kickstarter just likes to call it Backers, Pledges and Rewards. They try hard to avoid the term investment as that is dangerous. See below.
In return for pre-buying you get product and you get some satisfaction with helping to be an early buyer that helped make something possible. But it is really a transaction in most cases, a payment for goods or perhaps services.
When you buy a Pepsi you don't expect to get a share in the profit. You're buying a product. With Kickstarter the product doesn't usually exist yet so it is different in that it is a pre-buy.
An example is our family raises pastured pigs. We're building our own on-farm USDA inspected butcher shop (http://smf.me) and as a part of raising funds we pre-sold our product, pastured pork. We did this initially locally through CSA Pre-Buys and then this spring we did a Kickstarter project that raised an addition $33,456. When we finish construction and have our licenses we will then ship product from our farm to customers, some of whom joined our adventure via Kickstarter.
In our case the product already exists, we've been raising pigs on pasture and selling our pork for almost a decade. What is new is we're bringing the meat processing on-farm. This resolves a major bottleneck and helps to keep more of the money on-farm while also providing more humane handling for the animals and better quality for the customers. 369 people thought that was worth doing so they backed our project on Kickstarter. About a hundred more had already backed us prior to that. We provide product for backing. This is different than going to a bank for a loan (they aren't lending) or giving away a share of the business to investors (we're rather small for that as the project is only about $150,000).
Until recently it was illegal to solicit investment such as on Kickstarter which is why it is not an investment angle. With the new law that just passed there may soon be other web sites like Kickstarter that do offer investment opportunities. Alternatively, if you want to own the project and get profits then start your own business. That also gives you control.
With any project that's buying on the future, pre-buy or investment, you need to carefully consider if the project creator can deliver. Kickstarter says about 50% of the projects succeed. What they mean is 50% get successfully funded. As anyone with significant investment or business experience knows, not all funded projects will get to the production stage or be sustainable businesses. I have seen several Kickstarter 'successes' that never produced. It happens. But I think that most do succeed once funded. Caveat emperor.
Our project already successfully completed its Kickstarter run. Check it out at http://smf.me/ [smf.me]
Cheers,
-Walter Jeffries
Sugar Mountain Farm
Pastured Pigs, Sheep & Kids
in the mountains of Vermont
Read about our on-farm butcher shop project:
http://sugarmtnfarm.com/butchershop [sugarmtnfarm.com]
Re:Writers that don't own the show (Score:5, Interesting)
That's true, but I am assuming that publishers are self-interested entities. FireFly was not cancelled as a result of vendetta but because it was too expensive to produce.
Not saying you're wrong, but when half the episodes took place in the southern californian woods and were about people riding around on horseback through old west towns, and half the remaining episodes took place entirely within a single five-room spaceship set, It's hard to believe that it was particularly expensive to produce....
I suspect the real reason is that it just wasn't watched in big numbers, in part because people want their sci fi to be sci fi, and not 83% "old west shanty town"