SPEAKER_01 0:57

You write the film. Now it's production time. How are you getting the funding for it?

SPEAKER_00 1:04

At this point in my career, I'm no longer working in the nine of five. I'm now working on set. Like I'm a set production assistant for some non-union work. I'm ADing. I'm doing whatever I can. Uh one, to be able to obviously continue to pay bills and expenses, but two, so I can learn as much as I can. Because again, I'm not going into another production being like, all right, we got five people here and everybody's doing seven different things. It's not happening. So at the time, I'm thinking, you know what? I just got a really good job on set. I've booked a few acting roles. I've saved up some money. I'm going to shoot this thing completely out of my savings. I can't wait. It's going to be fun. I'm really doing the whole, like, I'm doing a flip on the Robert Townsend. Oh, he did it all on a credit card. I'm doing it all up my savings. This is going to be great. This is going to be fantastic. And then the strike happens. And the strike happens, and I'm like, I have to live. I have no other way of being able to do this right now. Um, I can't shoot out of my savings. And I'm even saying to myself, well, if we cut the budget down, like maybe take like seven grand out the budget, then maybe I can do it with like a little bit of my savings and then the rest or most of my savings. And then, and as we're just getting further into the strike, I'm I'm quickly um losing ground on bro, I cannot do this out of my savings because I have no other way to I have no other way to eat right now. So it came down to me saying, I'm gonna have to crowdfund, or we just gonna have to shoot this on a shoestring budget. And that's the last thing that I'm gonna do. I'm like, I'd rather not shoot it than have to shoot it on a shoestring budget just because I know the stress that that comes with, but also where I am in my career, I don't want that to be a representation of what I'm bringing into the industry and what people are gonna see when they see my work. I want them to be able to see, I'm giving you all that I got, I'm going out and getting the best of what I have and being able to have that work. So I said, okay, if we're gonna crowdfund, then that means that I need to look on these crowdfunding sites and see which one is gonna be the best for me. At this point in time, Seed and Spark was the best one for me because it was for it is for filmmakers and by filmmakers. So there are filmmakers who created this crowdfunding platform so that way uh filmmakers can feel that they get the best resources out of it. And one of the cool things on the back end of that is that as people were going to look to contribute to other projects, they happened to see our project, or case in point, we found people that ended up working on our project who was like, Oh, Baldy, what is this about? Wow, I'm actually losing my hair. Let me email them and see if they actually need any help with their project. So it all came full circle in that sense. But in putting it together and raising the funds, it really came down to if I'm gonna do this, I have to put my entire life out there. Now I already am to a degree with the story, but now I have to give you the backstory. I have to give you when I started losing my hair, what I thought was happening to me, the ups and downs that I was going through, how how that helped me to get into this industry, how that kind of pushed me a little bit more to get into this industry, why I feel that this story is important now. I gotta list all these things out so that way anybody that's reading through it is gonna say, man, like he really does care, he really wants to make this happen, and I want to help him make this happen. So it was honestly a scary time for me because I'm going back and I'm finding all the pictures of when my head just looks terrible. And I'm like, I have to put this out here for the world to see. And I don't know if I want to do this, but again, going back to are you in or are you not? We can't do halfway in, we can't do halfway out, similar to our nine to five. You either gonna be in it or you're not gonna be in it. So, what are you gonna do? We chose to dive all the way in, and I said, Okay, we're just gonna put up everything. Hopefully, people will resonate with the story, and at the same point in time, you could not get me to stop talking about it. Anybody and everybody that I was talking to at that point in time knew that I was going to begin crowdfunding for a story. Because it's it's one thing to say, hey, look, I'm gonna do this, I'll hit you up whenever we start doing it, right? But it's another thing for every time I'm seeing you, in some way, shape, or form, you see me bringing this up, you see me talking about it, you're gonna know that I care about it, and you're gonna be like, okay, let me at least read it. Let me at least see what's going on. Maybe I don't have two grand to give, maybe I only got$20 to give. But if that$20 helps him out a little bit, sure, I don't need this Uber Eats today. I don't need this Seamless today. It'll be fine, you know. So all of that played a role into it and me just calling people. Once we started crowdfunding, I was on the phone with everybody, treated it like I was in my nine to five. You know, I'm I'm from eight to six, I'm talking to everybody here in America. And then after nine o'clock, if there's anybody overseas that I know and it happens to be 8 a.m., hey, what's going on, man? It's been a minute since we talked. You gonna get some coffee? You got 10 minutes? Let me talk to you real fast about what I'm doing with this film that I'm trying to do. Talking to everybody in my Rolodex to see who can help make it happen. And I didn't want to go to people that were in the industry because we were already going through the same thing, and I felt bad being able to having to go to somebody that's like, look, I know we both not working, but can you give me$20 to help me make my film? To me, that just would have reflected poorly, and I didn't want to do that to anybody. So I went through my own network of everybody that saw me going from everything that I had been doing since moving out into New York all the way up to being here and saying, you guys are the people that I'm gonna rely on to make this happen. My my network that knew me before I got into this business, because y'all have seen the transformation, y'all have seen where I've come from and everything I've been able to do now. So I'm gonna lay this with you and let the chips fall where they may.

SPEAKER_01 7:05

Now, how did you come up with a budget? This it's gonna take this amount of money in order to shoot this film.

SPEAKER_00 7:11

Great question. Um, that goes back to me working on set and ADing a bunch of uh uh non-union projects here and there. Um, it it came down to because I was so involved in other people's projects, I would then begin to ask those questions about well, how much is this? How much is that? How much time did you need for this setup? How much time did you need for that setup? Why do you need this equipment? What do you see when you shoot this and when you storyboarded it? And how much is that gonna cost you when you get to the edit, babe, to be able to make sure that it's the correct way and the way in which you see it? So as I was working on different projects, I would just go and ask whoever was producing it or if they had a uh a UPM, a unit production manager, or whoever might have been there to say, Do you mind if I take a look at your budget to see what's going on? Now, part of me also wanted to do that as I was AD because I wanted to make sure we were staying on task and not spending anything more. I know that more so comes down to the producers, but I also knew you already got so much on your mind. How do I know this from when we only had six people back in the day? So I know you already got a lot on your mind. Whatever I can do to help alleviate that, I'm happy to help do it. And in doing that, it's also helping me down the line to be able to see what are things that they're not thinking of that I'm thinking of, so that way when I'm in their position, I'm already telling somebody, make sure to look out for this, this, and this, you know. So as I'm going through there, comparing budgets, asking other people that have done shorts, do you mind if I take a look at your budget? It don't even have to be your final budget. I'll take a look at the early budget that you had, and then even smaller productions like non-union indie films that are going on in New York. If there's anything around a budget that's somewhere floating online, I'm looking it up to see, well, how much did they use for this? How much did this location cost? How much are these actors? What's the difference between if I'm using SAG actors or non-union actors and so on? Is it a difference between somebody owning their equipment and allowing us to use it or not having their equipment and then we have to go and rent it and also get insurance? So trying to find all of those nuances.

SPEAKER_01 9:15

At this point, you have your script. How many pages to the script?

SPEAKER_00 9:20

I think it was 22 at the time, and we eventually cut it down to 1617.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

Okay, so 1617 pages, uh, you end up with a 15 minute short of about a 15-minute. Okay. So from that, you come up with a budget. What was your goal when you were crowdfunding for this short? What is it that you wanted to get?

SPEAKER_00 9:47

Our goal, our crowdfunding goal was$15,000. We want to get 15.

SPEAKER_01 9:51

When the campaign ended, what did you come away with?

SPEAKER_00 9:54

We were close to 25.

SPEAKER_01 9:56

Okay, so you so you came in over your ask?

SPEAKER_00 10:00

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 10:01

And now my question is: the campaign you did, was it for production and post or just production?

SPEAKER_00 10:10

The campaign that I did was for production because I thought with what we have in production, we will also have enough for post. And I'm so glad that we raised over what we asked for because had we not, we would have been cooked. We would have absolutely been been well done steak at somebody's barbecue. Because it's it came down to yes, we had enough to be able to get us through production. And funny enough, a quick quick side note. On our last day of crowdfunding, I remember telling everybody, I was like, I have a strange feeling the strike is going to end today. We cannot push our shoot date back, we have to shoot next week. We were gonna shoot the week after we finished crowdfunding. Everybody was like, Look, it takes like 10 business days for us to even get the funds from the platform. Like, we can't do this, we have to push it back. And I'm saying, guys, if we push it back, we're gonna lose everybody because the strike is gonna end, people gonna start getting jobs. We have to do this immediately. And lo and behold, literally right after we finished our crowdfunding, the strike ended, and everybody started being like, Oh, oh, this person's gotta pull out, this person's gotta pull out, this person's gotta pull out. So I'm I'm so glad that we ended up shooting it right after. But I say all that to say it got us through production. We were able to pay for the locations, pay uh our cast, uh, pay to make sure that everybody had food. We also had a holding space so that way if you weren't needed on set, you had somewhere else to be able to sit and get other work done so that way you were still around or nearby, and excuse me, somewhere for our background to be. But when we got to post, yeah, we were able to pay our editor. I didn't even think about if we needed a sound editor. Thought about okay, we need composition. Cool, I had somebody that was gonna do it, but then they have some life things that came up. So that kind of delayed us about four to five months. So now when I have to go out and pay for a composer, I'm like, I didn't I didn't have this in the budget. Now I gotta pay for that. Sound editor, depending on how many edits we got to go through, didn't even consider how much it's gonna cost to submit to these festivals and so on. So that was a whole nother expense that I truly at the time was not as prepared for as I should have been. But I'm thankful that I was able to build up my savings a little bit more to be able to help us get over the hump. And we also got a few more, um, a few more contributions from people afterwards once they were like, Well, let me see what the project looks like. And when I was able to show it to them, they was like, Okay, you know what? I want to help you out a little bit because I I believe in what it is that y'all are doing, but it was just for production, and I will definitely not make that mistake again. And I'm I'm telling everybody, raise for production and posts. Because you think posts won't cost that much, but you'll be surprised how many things end up getting lost or delayed in post production just because you run out of funding.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

I would also add to that have a marketing campaign. So, cause you need money in order to market the project.