We’ve been working for over two years on an unfunded basis and realized during the summer of 2011 that we’d gotten to the point in which we couldn’t continue work on the film without outside help. Because of this we decided to stop work on the film itself and concentrate on fundraising efforts on several different fronts. As a part of our overall efforts, we decided to try our hand at running a crowdfunding campaign, a way that an increasing number of independent films fund a portion of their budget by seeking contributions from private donors.

During the last few months of 2011 we ran a campaign on crowdfunding site IndieGoGo with the goal of raising at least $20,000. This would have allowed us to carry out several weeks of concentrated editing work plus defray some of our production costs, which up until now we the creative team have been paying out of our pockets. The campaign ended on December 31, 2011, and thanks to the generosity of 129 donors we managed to meet our really ambitious goal and raised $20, 581. This means that we’ll soon be back in the editing room, working on distilling our 4000 minutes of footage into a 90-minute film.

We’re absolutely delighted with how the campaign went and also delighted that it’s over. It was an incredibly time-consuming and all-around challenging experience, but also gratifying on many levels. Besides the much-needed funds it allow us to raise, it also helped us expand our reach. We’re in touch with a growing number of people and organizations interested in what we’re doing and who feel an affinity for the messages we’d like to spread via our film.

We’re more grateful than we can say to the donors who believe in what we’re doing enough to support our work.

The campaign page is chock-full of information and hyperlinks to video clips or other social media sites, so if you’d like to know more about our film-in-the-making, you might want to check it out here.