Crowdfunding, freedom and cinema

There is no point in explaining, especially in Habré, what crowdfunding is and why it is needed. Yes, and to surprise today with a successful fundraising for a project with the help of this ... hmm ... technology is quite difficult - articles with an overview of successful fundraising campaigns are regularly published online. But the project that I want to talk about today has already become unique for our country, and perhaps (I hope so), will be the first example of a qualitatively new approach to creating full-length films for world cinema. As you have already understood from the picture - I am talking about the film “28 Panfilovs” , which the director Andrei Shalopa started shooting. You may have already read about this film and how unusual it is, but it is possible that you, like me, have not yet received this information. Therefore (by the way, and not only therefore - details a bit later) I decided to tell about this film on Habré. But for a start - how it all began.

Actually, the idea of ​​the film and the screenplay were born in 2009, but various state organizations and producers did not arouse the interest of the project of a film of patriotic content. Unfortunately, today profit brings only what is fun, beautiful and filmed on the patterns of Hollywood movies. And war is not fun and not beautiful at all, and besides, Hollywood, frankly, nicherta does not know what real war is. But let's not talk about sad things. So, the search for money did not give a result, and Andrew decided to turn directly to the audience. He and the future film crew prepared two small clips about the future film and presented them to the Internet public. At the same time, a fundraiser for the film was launched at Bumstarter - in just a month it was planned to collect 300 thousand rubles. The amount for the movie is meager, but it had to show whether the viewer needs such a movie, how much this topic is interesting to the people of Russia. The planned money was collected in two days, and by the end of the fundraising campaign the amount exceeded 3 million rubles:


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And this is 5% of the cost of production of the entire film, which is estimated at 60 million. Amid the budgets of other modern Russian films about the war, the amount looks modest, but the director believes that they should be enough. “We will not save. We simply will not steal. ”- said Andrey in a recent interview.

Everything happened in the summer of this year and, unfortunately, I then missed this important event. Meanwhile, only a few months have passed, and the film crew has already prepared a six-minute video for the collected money in order to report to the audience, and to have on hand material that can be shown to colleagues and cinema workers. And before continuing, I invite you to see a three-minute excerpt from the footage.



This video was published on November 25 and at the same time the fundraising for the continuation of the film was resumed. And, apparently, the future viewers highly appreciated the footage: 10 days after the publication more than 3 million rubles were collected. Thus, today we have a chance to witness a unique event - the creation of a full-length feature film, fully funded by the audience. At the moment, I know only one feature film, the money for the shooting of which was partially collected in the same way. This is a fantastic comedy "Iron Sky" , filmed by Finnish filmmakers. Future viewers of the film collected 16% (1.2 million euros) of the total budget of the film. At the moment, the fundraising campaign for the film “28 Panfilov's” brought the film's authors more than 6.2 million rubles, which is 10.7% of the total budget, while ideally the entire amount for the film shooting should come from the audience - this is exactly the goal facing the authors of the film.

So, I have already told about crowdfunding and cinema, it remains to explain - what does freedom have to do with it? In fact, this third factor was for me personally decisive in the desire to spend a couple of hours talking about this project. See for yourself: in recent years we have lived with the hope that sometime in Russia an excellent film will be shot that will not be ashamed to see for ourselves and show to others. Unfortunately, almost all the premieres brought only disappointment, and this is especially true of films on military subjects: from the insane thrash of “Burnt by the Sun - 2” and ending with the freshly baked infantile “Stalingrad”. The viewer did not need these films, but who asked him? Budget money (that is, the same viewer) was generously allocated for the shooting of the next "masterpiece". And for the first time, the viewer had the opportunity to speak directly with the director and decide which movie to shoot. Today, I personally control where my money goes, what movie is filmed for them, I freely bypass all the bureaucratic barriers, which are enormous in filmmaking, I deprive the many swindlers and cinema businessmen accustomed to tamper out of taxes paid by me, Directly to communicate with the authors of the film, I myself consciously take part in the creation of such a film, which I have long dreamed to see - is this not freedom? I think you will agree with me too.

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