When Zach Braff launched his Kickstarter campaign for “Wish I Was Here”, he caught a lot of flak.

Kickstarter is a platform and I believe anyone should be able to use it. Even celebrities. And I agree that famous people bring new funders to the platform.

Zach raised $3,105,473 on Kickstarter, exceeding his $2 million goal significantly. Since May 24th, when the campaign ended, till today, there have been eleven updates via Kickstarter (there were 32 while the campaign was ongoing). He says he hired a team of three to manage the kickstarter funders as he wanted “everyone to love the experience”.

As Perry and Yancey said in their post:

Kickstarter is a new way for creators to bring their projects to life. Not through commerce, charity, or investment — through a new model powered by a willing audience. The Veronica Mars and Zach Braff projects offered backers tickets to the premiere, cameos in the movie, access to the creative process, and other experiences in exchange for pledges. Fans were thrilled, and 100,000 people jumped on board.

It is a willing audience, who obviously thought that the perks they were getting were worth what they paid. They got to feel good about making this movie happen and Zach put effort to ensure they felt cared for.

“Wish I was here” premiered at Sundance and was acquired by Focus Features for $2. 7 million.

The budget was, reportedly, $5 million.
$3.1 million was raised on Kickstarter, so let’s say it is roughly $2.7 after all fees and fulfillment. The remaining $2.3 million came from investors of some sort – maybe from Zach himself, friends and family, and investors who didn’t insist on creative control.

This means, with the Focus deal, the investors have recouped their money. And there are still the other territories to be sold ((Focus bought the rights only for North America, Poland and South Africa)), DVD, streaming rights etc.

If this movie had been funded without Kickstarter, Zach would have had less creative control and he would also still be working to recoup his budget. But with Kickstarter, Zach benefitted and his investors who were willing to have no creative control, also benefitted.

The hurdle rate just got a lot lower when Kickstarter is thrown into the mix. This is true for everyone, but it is specifically true for celebrities because they can fund such large amounts.

This raises all sorts of questions:

• Is crowdfunding  a risk-free form of filmmaking that celebrities can enjoy? Is it another perk of being a celebrity?
• Will investors ask celebrities to throw crowdfunding into the mix more often? Investors can validate the idea and reduce their own risk.
• Will this lead to investors wanting to fund more celebrities (or proven properties like Veronica Mars) who are able to bring in “free” money?
• Will this this help or hurt independent filmmakers who don’t bring as much crowdfunding clout as a celebrity does ((I don’t necessarily mean “on” Kickstarter or other crowdfunding platforms (although that might also happen), but rather, the choice producers will make in terms of which movies to take on, the choices PE funds will make in terms of which movies to fund etc.)) ?

It will be interesting to watch this space.

“Varenya” will participate in Film Bazaar’s Co-Production Market in Goa, India.

Film Bazaar is organized by India’s National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) and aims to help filmmakers with South Asian stories connect with financiers.

Every year, IFP nominates a project to attend the Co-Production Market and I am honored that they chose “Varenya” to participate this year.

Read NFDC’s announcement here and Screen Daily’s article here.

My gratitude to IFP and NFDC for their support.

“Varenya” has been selected by Film Independent as one of 10 scripts that will participate in the 2013 Screenwriting Lab.

Grateful to Film Independent for the opportunity.

The press release is here.

I’m excited to share my first feature, “Varenya”.

I’ve been working on the script since I was at NYU and am thrilled that it has been selected for IFP’s Emerging Storytellers section. It will participate in Independent Film Week, 2013.

I am super-grateful to everyone who advised and supported the project so far.

The film page, with more detail, is here.

For the April issue of Vogue India, Shahnaz Siganporia wrote a piece on three women working with poetry. Many thanks for the article.

THE VERSE SCREENER
SHRIPRIYA MAHESH
In her final year of the Graduate Film program at NYU, the energetic Shripriya Mahesh, 39, signed up for a class called Directing Poetry. Twelve writer/directors would be shortlisted, and each would work on adapting a poem into a short film. She was picked to being her tutelage under Hollywood’s intellectual heartthrob James Franco, who was the leading the study group. And that’s how Mahesh began working on her short film, The Color Of Time, starring Franco and Jessica Chastain, among others.

Poetry was nowhere on the horizon for this Chennai-born-and-raised woman — in school, she was obsessed with her camera and thought she would be a photographer some day. But as she grew up, the need to be self-sufficient took over and Mahesh got her MBA from Harvard instead. She almost found her calling in Silicon Valley — “I loved the Valley, and was happy working on cool products used by millions of people” — but fate led her to New York, where the nascent tech industry provided little satisfaction. The old photography bug bit again, but this time she found it too solitary an experience, feeling more drawn to the world of filmmaking. and that’s how she ended up joining a class in which she trans-created poetry.

Today, Mahesh is a bona fide poetry buff and wants to work more with the art. In the meantime, she’s busy in Singapore, researching and writing her first full-length film, set in South India. “With poetry, it’s easy to get lost in the complexity of the words. Film can make it more accessible because there is a visual clarity,”she explains. As for her favorite verse, Mahesh frequently finds herself immersed in the world of Pulitzer prize-winning poet, CK Williams. “I was drawn to [this poems] ‘The Color Of Time’ and ‘Waking Jed’ because I am a parent,” she says. Both examine the father-son relationship and form the core narrative of her film, out this year.

I posted earlier about updating your RSS feed to site’s core feed.

I will be making the switch tomorrow.

I am going to re-direct my Feedburner feed to my site’s core feed – http://tatvam.com/feed. I am not quite sure how the re-direct works, so if this is the last post you see and you do not see a new post on April 15th, then it means the Feedburner feed you are subscribed to no longer works.

If you wish to keep reading, please update your feed to http://tatvam.com/feed

Thank you.

If you see this post in your RSS reader, thank you for reading.

If you would like to continue reading, please update the RSS feed to this feed instead- http://tatvam.com/feed

I am in the process of dropping Feedburner, which currently powers this site’s RSS feed. Why am I making this change? Well, recently, Google announced that they are shutting down their RSS reader, imaginatively titled, Reader. All indications are that they will likely shut down Feedburner too. I’d rather get ahead of this possible (and likely) shutdown,

http://tatvam.com/feed is the site’s core feed  and it will not change as long as this blog is active. This feed is exactly what you’ve been reading all along – a combination of my film, tech and tumblr posts. If this core feed is what you have in your feed reader, you are all set. If you have a Feedburner feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/Tatvam or http://feeds.feedburner.com/AlmostAsGoodAsChocolate), you should update it if you want to keep reading. To add it to your feed reader of choice, just copy and paste the URL (http://tatvam.com/feed) into your feed reader.

I will make the switch on April 15th.

Thank you  for reading and participating.

The New York Times reports that scientists at MIT have uncovered a way to show the invisible motions of your body, like your heart beat, eye movement etc., on screen. You have to watch the video in the link – it’s pretty incredible.

The system works by homing in on specific pixels in a video over the course of time. Frame-by-frame, the program identifies minute changes in color and then amplifies them up to 100 times, turning, say, a subtle shift toward pink to a bright crimson.

What’s even better is that they have released the source code so that anyone can use it. There are a ton of applications to this, across several fields. But in film, there are immediate and cool uses. I’m betting someone is going to come up with a short film, run it through the algorithm and have it up online in… less than 2 weeks.

Such great work. Thank you, Prof. William T. Freeman and team!

Reprise is an official selection at the 23rd Melbourne Queer Film Festival and plays with a great set of short films.

It was also selected for the Cine en los barrios section of the 53rd Cartagena Film Festival, which seems like a cool, experimental section to take the films out to the people.

Now, it would be much cooler if I was actually able to go watch it being screened at either location, but I’m excited about the Australian and South American premiers and happy that more people will get to watch it.

Many thanks to the programming staff at the festivals.