Interlude – Page 5 – Fan Film Factor

How I spent my first crowd-funded $12 on INTERLUDE…

As filming dates rapidly approach, things are getting really exciting for both AXANAR and INTERLUDE! And while ALEC PETERS updates everyone on the progress of his fan film, I’m going to write a series of blogs about the happenings on the Interlude side of the fence…since it’s a really fascinating journey we’re on. I want to share that journey with all of you as much as I can; that’s what blogging is all about!

I’m not planning to write a blog whenever I pay for something for my fan film. But your first time is always special, and I wanted to tell you about it.

But first, I’d like to share a another special moment that came at 12:16am on June 23, 2019—12 days after I’d launched my crowd-funding campaign for Interlude. I received what was to be the first of nearly 100 daily e-mails from GoFundMe…

Wow. Just…wow.

It’d taken me a couple of weeks to get my bank account properly linked to my GoFundMe account. But truth to tell, I hadn’t realized that GoFundMe gives you the money each night just after midnight for any donations your campaign receives that day. Honestly, I wasn’t sure how they did it, but getting money transferred each night at midnight felt like having elves or leprechauns visit and leave money behind! Some days, I’d receive less than $10 while other days would see deposits into the hundreds or even thousands of dollars! For for three months, those “Your money is on the way” e-mails appeared almost every night. It was soooo weird.

Anyway, I let that money accrue, and the balance in my bank account just kept growing. As of the beginning of September, my account balance was over $19,000. (This is a separate bank account set up for the campaign, not our main joint account.)

But then came the moment that I knew was inevitable. After watching the money only go INTO the account for three months, I was finally going to have to make my first payment FROM that account. And even though, as executive producer, I’ve always known I was going to have to one day start spending those crowd-funded dollars, it still felt weird…and a little scary! After all, once money is spent, it doesn’t come back without more crowd-funding. And I gave donors a very specific budget.

To make things even more scary, my first expense was completely unplanned for and unbudgeted. (See? I toldja we’d forget something! That’s why we need contingency.) Fortunately, the unexpected expense was (this first time) was only twelve bucks…

So what cost us just $12? Glad you asked…

INTERLUDE hits its goal of $19,500 on STAR TREK’s anniversary!

I feel overwhelmed right now, deeply touched, humbled, and just a little bit verklempt.

A few hours ago, during the 53rd anniversary of the debut of Star Trek on NBC, the GoFundMe campaign for my Axanar Universe fan film INTERLUDE reached its goal of $19,500. It was an amazing feeling…especially as the donation that got us there was for an incredibly-generous $500. Earlier in the day, another donor had brought us to exactly $19,000 with a $28 donation. That kind of support and belief in our team and me means more than I can put into words.

The backer who pushed us into the end zone was SHANE FREUND, an Axanar supporter who had also donated to Interlude a few weeks previously. Along with yesterday’s donation came this message:

On the anniversary of Star Trek, I wanted to help you reach your goal because having the courage to take a risk is what Star Trek is all about.

I thought about that statement for a few minutes. In my mind, Star Trek is about a lot of things: tolerance, empathy, inclusiveness, loyalty, duty, honesty, a desire to explore and discover, hope for the future, and a willingness to help others to make things better. And yes, Star Trek is also about taking chances and believing in yourself, in the abilities of your friends and crew, and even believing in luck and your ability to beat the odds.

I grew up in the 1970s watching scenes like this over and over in reruns…

And when you think about it, taking a chance and beating the odds is also what crowd-funding is all about. You put yourself out there and hope that your friends (and crew…and a bunch of strangers) will come through and help you out.

Of course, successfully crowd-funding a project (or a dream) does require a lot of work . Campaigns don’t just fund themselves. But it all comes down to one game-changing word: CAN. “I can.” “You can.” “We can.” Those are among the most powerful sentences in the English language.

And do you know what the other most powerful sentences are? “I can’t.” “We can’t.” “You can’t.”

I mention this because I’ve spent this entire GoFundMe campaign these past three months trying my darnedest to ignore the almost constant drip-drop of negativity from many, many members of the Axamonitor Facebook group. Even when some fair-minded folks over there tried to be supportive of me and my project, others would make comments like this… Viewers like to watch medical dramas online for many reasons. Films about osteoarthritis are a very common joint disease that affects about 80% of our population at the age of 50-60 years, but sometimes it manifests itself earlier, at the age of 30. For osteoarthritis Flexoptima gel is primarily prescribed because of its high effectiveness in fighting the disease. As you know, in various films and TV series, the joint is often formed by the articular surfaces of bones covered with cartilage tissue.

INTERLUDE’s not-so-phantom menace: SCHEDULING!

Before I dive into the slings and arrows of outrageous scheduling, I’d like to thank INTERLUDE supporter and donor STEPHEN HUGHES for creating the stunning image above (along with several others). This is the kind of love and enthusiasm that’s the cherry on top of the sundae that is fan filmmaking.

I’d also like to thank all of the donors who have helped bring the Interlude GoFundMe to a staggering $18,808!!! This included an amazingly generous $300 donation this past weekend from a member of the Axamonitor Facebook group—CLARENCE THOMPSON—who had previously donated $100…bringing his total to $400 and giving him the honored rank of “Captain” in my credits.

Clarence is one of a small few of that group who have donates, but I want to acknowledge this support from some of those whom I’ve historically called “detractors.” Many of them still detract and deride and demonize, but obviously not all…and that says and means a lot to me. So a big THANK YOU to everyone who has stepped forward to support Interlude.

And of course, there’s still time to donate (we’re less than $700 from our $19,500 goal):

https://www.gofundme.com/interlude

Okay, let’s get onto the update as I shine the spotlight on…scheduling!

Y’know how starships have short-range and long-range sensors (and if the script calls for it, medium-range sensors)? Well, it turns out that fan films have the same thing—or at least mine does. You might remember from back in June a blog I wrote about all of the things that went wrong and threatened to delay the launch of my GoFundMe campaign: epic floods, stray dogs, trapped woodpeckers, etc.

Well, it turns out that Murphy and his law about things going wrong isn’t quite finished with me yet. Read on, my friends…

INTERLUDE GoFundMe tops $18,000…nearing the goal!

It wasn’t long ago that I was fearing, even assuming, that the GoFundMe campaign for my Axanar Universe fan film INTERLUDE would fall far short of its $19.5K goal. And so my directors and I created a “point of no return” minimum budget of $13.5K that would guarantee us being able to shoot in November.

But after a an amazing “Thousand Dollar Thursday” push a couple of weeks ago that turned into FIVE Thousand Dollar Thursday, we blew past that minimum and were now looking at the reality of shooting this thing (or at least the Ares Studios scenes) in November…barely 10 weeks away! And now that we had over $17K in the coffers, that meant we didn’t have to tighten our belts nearly as much. It also meant it was time to make a final budget!

Last Friday, I had a very productive 90-minute production call with my two co-directors, VICTORIA FOX and JOSHUA IRWIN. They’re both super-busy right now on other professional productions, as well as finishing up their latest Avalon Universe fan film “Demons.” But we carved out some time to add up everything we now could and couldn’t afford to do with Interlude.

Without going too deeply into the weeds (I’m done with the hassles of detailed budget blogs—too many back-seat producers out there), I can tell you all with absolute confidence and excitement that we’re now back to being able to do everything that we originally wanted to do in this fan film—with two notable exceptions….

The first item where we’re still short is that we completely forgot to budget hard drive storage for all of our video footage! (I knew we were gonna forget something! I even said so in my budget blog…third to last paragraph.) Josh’s current hard drive and back-up drive are filled with Avalon footage, so we need to buy new drives for Interlude. Two 10TB G-drives (one for back-up) are about $600 total. So we still need funds for that.

The second item is contingency (also known as “what could possibly go wrong?”) funds. Assuming we raise enough to buy the hard drives but don’t bring in a penny more, then we’re at a point where we have to pray that everything goes perfectly and nothing unexpected pops up…which almost never happens, of course!

All of which is to say that this crowd-funding campaign is still very much alive and active, so please keep spreading the word. Remember that there are still very nice Axanar poster sets available from MARK PAYTON for $125 each (with proceeds after shipping & handling being donated by Mark to Interlude). And of course, if you haven’t donated yet (or would like to donate more), here’s the link…

https://www.gofundme.com/interlude

Donations do keep coming in, and we’re just about at $18,300 (including about $100 in direct Paypal donations) from 215 backers. Another $1,200 gets us those hard drives and $1,000 in contingency. I’m confident we can make it!

AXANAR posters (set of four) FOR SALE from MARK PAYTON…to benefit INTERLUDE!

A few weeks ago, two of the donors to my Axanar Universe fan film INTERLUDE offered to match, dollar-for-dollar, every donation made to my GoFundMe campaign for 24 hours. It was incredibly generous and resulted in an amazing day of over $5K in donations.

Now, another supporter has stepped forward with a very generous offer. MARK PAYTON is an artist who lives and breathes Axanar (an Axanartist, if you will!). His artwork graces the pages of his original Axanar novella, “The Inverness Revision,” and he’s done other graphics for the Axanar project over the past couple of years.

Among the art pieces that Mark created were the four images you see above, including the stunningly majestic rendering of the late RICHARD HATCH as Kharn the Undying and the montage of the main Axanar characters drawn in a comic/animation style. Last year, Mark printed up a run of posters for these beautiful images to sell at Axacon. At the end of the weekend, he still had about 15-20 sets of posters left over.

Now, Mark is looking to offer these four collector’s item posters as a set for $125 (including shipping and handling), and I am certain there are some Axanerds out there (like me) who want them. I’ve seen them up close, and they’re very high quality prints. Three are sized at 11″ x 17″ and the other is 8.5″ x 11″. All are shipped as the poster-only, but each can be inexpensively framed as the sizes are pretty standard.

However, Mark has ALSO offered to take whatever proceeds he collects and donate that money (minus packaging and shipping costs) to the Interlude GoFundMe! NOTE: this is not a perk. No one is donating directly to me. People are purchasing posters from Mark Payton who is then welcome to make a donation just like any other supprter.

Just how much that donation to Interlude will be is uncertain. Even if Mark sells all the posters he has left, the shipping costs to different states and possibly other countries is unknown right now. But Mark estimates that selling everything could put an additional $1,000 into the campaign. And since we’re currently at more than $17,800 (including PayPal donations), another thousand would place us only $700 from our $19,500 goal!

But as they say on TV: “Hurry, because supplies are limited, and this offer won’t last!”

To purchase one or more of these poster sets, contact Mark at [email protected] with the subject line of “Interlude posters”.

How INTERLUDE’s Thousand Dollar Thursday became FIVE Thousand Dollar Thursday!

Wow.

Even in my wildest dreams, I didn’t expect this…although my friend MIKE BAWDEN predicted it the day before. “I really think you’ll be up five or six thousand dollars by the end of Thursday,” he said, “You might even come close to your $19,500 goal.”

And he was right. After a crazy day of more than 70 donations, 40 from brand new donors and another 30 donations from existing backers (plus the $1,200 each from both of my match-backers), we’d taken in more than $5,000 for our GoFundMe for INTERLUDE!

So how did this all happen? Was it just blind luck? Did everyone simply wait to donate on the same day? How did Thousand Dollar Thursday turn into FIVE Thousand Dollar Thursday?

I know that a number of my readers have held crowd-funders of your own—or are planning to. And when something works for one of us, there’s no reason not to share our “secrets.” After all, we fan filmmakers are in this together!

So this blog is a deep-dive for anyone who is interested in everything that happened “behind-the-scenes” to set up all the dominos that fell into place so perfectly yesterday. Sure, every campaign is unique, and not everything that I did will translate to other campaigns. But take from this whatever insights you think might help you out.

For everyone else, feel free to read this blog if you’re curious to find out everything that the duck was doing under the water while gliding smoothly over the surface. It was pretty wild! Otherwise, feel free to skip this one…

And so it begins…THOUSAND DOLLAR THURSDAY!

For the next 24 hours, every donation to the INTERLUDE GoFundMe will be tripled! The starting point is $11,701. (Yeah, I noticed NCC number hiding in there.) Let’s see if we can reach $12,901 by Thursday at midnight!

Click here to donate: https://www.gofundme.com/interlude

I’ll be updating this total throughout the day.

I went to sleep 6 hours ago and woke up to discover we’re nearly halfway to our $1200 ceiling already! Take a look…

I just had an EGOTASTIC FUNTIME with JP!

There’s a LOT of video podcasts out there, and one of my favorites (and I’m not just saying that!) is EGOTASTIC FUNTIME. The host, JP, is really funny, lively, insightful, and of course, a total geek. He covers The Orville, Star Trek, the latest blockbuster movies, video games, and whatever water cooler geek-news is out there at the moment. He edits his videos very well, cutting out the pauses and “ums” so you get one of those short ‘n’ choppy viewing experiences that can save you a lot of viewing time. (Now, if only certain bloggers could learn to be just as pithy…but we all have our mountains to climb, folks!)

Anyway, JP has recently expanded his offerings to include what he’s calling “Egotastic Talks” (I would have called them “FunTalks”…but that’s just me.) Last week, he premiered the new format with an 18-minute podcast featuring ALEC PETERS discussing both AXANAR news and Alec’s exciting online auction for the Trekcetera Museum collection. And this week, JP’s second guest was none other than the guy typing out this blog: me.

Naturally, the subject of the interview would be my Axanar Universe fan film INTERLUDE. The challenge at this point in a campaign (at all points really) is finding ways to spread the word beyond people who already know about it. I’d been working with JP for a number of weeks trying to set up an opportunity to appear on his podcast, as he has over 22K subscribers. In fact, in the two days since the video got posted, it’s been viewed more than two thousand times!

This has translated into upwards of $350 in new donations to the GoFundMe campaign since Monday. Things had slowed down prior to that, but it wasn’t too concerning, as I’ve been planning for the big THOUSAND DOLLAR THURSDAY (tomorrow) when all donations will be tripled. So I hadn’t been pushing the campaign as much as I usually did over the past seven days in order to focus more donations towards this Thursday.

Speaking of which, Thousand Dollar Thursday is going to have a “tote board” progress report, of sorts, as I track the donations throughout the day…hoping to reach our target of $1200 for the day. Here’s the GoFundMe link again (if you haven’t already committed it to memory):

https://www.gofundme.com/f/interlude

In the meantime, check out my appearance on Egotastic Funtime below. It was an hour-long chat that JP edited down to 29 minutes, so there’s a couple of “jumps” in the conversation flow, but it’s still a fun little chat and worth a listen…

TRIPLE the value of your donation to the INTERLUDE GoFundMe for 24 hours during $1,000 THURSDAY (August 15)!!!

This is really exciting, folks! Last week, two of my backers for INTERLUDE approached me separately with an offer to match—dollar for dollar—any donation made to the Interlude GoFundMe during a 24-hour period that I could determine. Both backers have asked to remain anonymous, but one of them is the fan who donated $1,000 just a few days after we launched in June.

After discussing details with both of them, we came up with the following rules for this special one-day promotion:

The 24-hour period will be this Thursday, August 15 beginning at the stroke of midnight PDT and ending at 11:59pm PDT Thursday night.
Both of these backers will each match any donation from $1 to $100 with an equal donation…essentially TRIPLING whatever you give. This means a $10 donation is worth $30 to the campaign, $25 becomes $75, and $100 becomes $300!
The matching donations will max out at $1,200 for the day for each of our two match-backers. This means that, if we manage to hit our ceiling, the Interlude GoFundMe will take in $3,600 in just 24 hours!!!

Now, you might be wondering why they’re matching only donations of between $1 and $100 and not larger ones. We discussed this, and the reason is because both of these match-backers want this to be FUN! But if someone came along and just donated all $1,200 in one fell swoop. Then—poof!—the promotion would end…and no one else would enjoy knowing that their donation just tripled.

And why is there a $1,200 ceiling? That’s simply because that’s the amount that each of these backers was comfortable matching. I don’t want anyone going broke, y’know…and it’s a very generous offer on both of their parts.

So if you’ve been waiting to make a contribution to Interlude, THIS THURSDAY is the day to do it! And if you’ve already donated, even if you just have an extra $5 sitting around, it’ll be worth $15. If we make our maximum, we’ll hit nearly $15K…surpassing the minimum $13.5K we need by August 20 in order to film in November.

You’re also welcome to donate before or after thus Thursday, but for 24 hours, it’ll be a sprint to $1,200! Here’s the link (and I’ll post it again on Thursday, of course)…

https://www.gofundme.com/interlude

The INTERLUDE GoFundMe tops $11,000!

Yesterday, the GoFundMe campaign for my fan film INTERLUDE crossed $11,000! Although this might not seem as significant a milestone as crossing the half-way point or crossing $10,000…it’s very exciting to me personally because it means I’m doing my job properly. (Also, most of the detractors never thought I’d raise more than $5K-$10K at the most, and now even some of them are impressed!)

Y’see, unlike many folks who make fan films, I don’t have any background or experience in filmmaking. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. While I’m a decent graphic designer and can edit as a novice with iMovie on my Mac, I’m not a director or VFX artist or lighting specialist or cameraman. I can’t compose music, build sets, create props, do make-up, or even sew uniforms and costumes. I’m not a sound FX guy, and while I’ve done a couple of fan film voice-overs, I’m not an actor and won’t even appear in my own fan film! All I did was write a script.

So why am I here at all? What’s my bag, baby?

The simple truth is that I’m here to convince people like you to give me your money. In return, I’ve assembled a very talented team who are going to make an amazing fan film for all of you to enjoy. It’s going to have the quality level of PRELUDE TO AXANAR (or as close as we can get!) and be able to stand beside its “siblings” (Prelude and the two Axanar sequels) as a proud part of the expanded “Axanar Universe.”

But in order to do that, things (some of them kinda expensive) needed to be paid for.

Believe me, I would have loved to have just written a check or charged everything to a credit card. But I simply don’t have the financial means—certainly not at the level required to match up to the other Axanar fan films. And even though the Ares bridge set is now complete (or 98% of the way there), this fan film is more than just the set.

So with essentially no skills, no experience, and no money, what the heck am I doing trying to make a fan film???

Well, let me tell you what I do have…