Last Friday, JOSHUA IRWIN, showrunner for the very impressive fan series known as the AVALON UNIVERSE, surprised and confused fans and supporters by posting a video telling viewers NOT to donate to their current GoFundMe campaign—at least, not until Monday…
This fun-yet-intriguing video was followed by a shorter one on Saturday…
And a third one on Sunday…
The videos have done their job, as commenters on Facebook have generally expressed interest in finding out what’s going on. After all, when you’re trying to crowd-fund THREE different upcoming episodes of your series by raising $20,000 in donations from fans, you kinda WANT people to donate. So…what gives?
Well, wonder no more—as earlier today the big reveal was, er, revealed. A few clever folks actually guessed correctly: Monday begins a seven-day DONATION MATCH WEEK where every dollar donated to the current Avalon Universe will be DOUBLED (up to $3,000)…thanks to the generosity of angel-supporter RAY MYERS.
Take a look at today’s awesome video…
And here’s the link to the campaign…
https://www.gofundme.com/f/zdn4p-AvalonUniverse2021
If the name Ray Myers sounds familiar, you might remember him from my own fan film INTERLUDE, where Josh Irwin was director of photography. Back in the summer of 2019, I’d launched a similarly ambitious GoFundMe with an $18K goal. A few weeks into the campaign, I woke up one morning to discover that at some point the previous night, someone had donated a whopping $3K to my project—someone I’d never even met before!
Ray and I went on to become friends, and in addition to getting listed in the Interlude credits as associate producer and getting his name on the Game of Thrones memorial coffee cup in the engineering scene, Ray also got to play the first officer of the ill-fated U.S.S. Artemis.
Ray has maintained a friendship with Josh as well as with me. And when he saw a few weeks ago that the Avalon GoFundMe was slowing down a bit at a level about a quarter of the way there, Ray reached out to Josh with an offer to do a dollar-matching donation promotion for a week whenever Josh was ready to do so.
With the Creation Las Vegas con and then the 55th anniversary of Star Trek sucking up most of the oxygen in fandom, it was decided that this week would be the best opportunity to build up to a big reveal and then pull out all the stops for the next seven days…so expect me to be talking up Avalon quite a lot this week! In fact, I’ve got a special Zoom video interview coming up (hopefully) on Friday to coincide with a brand new release from Avalon and also an exclusive sneak peek at the upcoming AGENT OF NEW WORLDS Avalon fan film…the first to be funded using donations from this current campaign.
If the maximum match amount is reached, Avalon could finish this week nearly 60% of the way to their ultimate $20K goal. Donations are already starting to come in. In fact, the first $105 from four different supporters has been donated since the new video was released just three hours ago. That’s 3.5% of the $3K needed this week, and that means $210 for more Avalon releases!
So if you’ve got a few dollars you could spare, click on the link below and they will count DOUBLE until this Sunday night at midnight Central Time…
I popped a little cash in there. Thank you angel donor.
Thank YOU for donating, too!
How are series continuing? The CBS Guidelines don’t allow for that.
CBS doesn’t really seem to care much apparently. There are dozens of Trek fan series still producing episodes, and none have heard from CBS/VCBS in the five years since the guidelines were announced.