A Kickstarter projects that worked: Kino/Veronica Mars

[poormadpeter]

I post about this here as there are often discussions on the forum about the possibility of Kickstarter campaigns with regards to Elvis material, both audio and visual. This is a difficult issue with Elvis as most of video/audio of him belongs to the movie studios and/or Sony. However, there have been some remarkable successes with Kickstarter campaigns in the recent past.

Just a month or two back, the Kino DVD label started such a campaign in order to fund a Blu-ray boxed set containing silent films made by African-American directors and casts, with the plan to restore and release seven films. Within just a few days, the campaign had reached its target, and the boxed set will now feature more films than originally planned when it is released in February next year. Why is this different to an Elvis project? Well, the main difference is that the films in question are in the public domain, so there is no need for studio negotations in order to use them. Similar projects, albeit on a smaller scale, have been started and completed by Ben Model, a silent film collector and musical scorer. Under the banner of "Undercrank Productions" he has released a number of burn-on-demand DVDs featuring forgotten or previously-thought-lost silent films via Amazon - it works in much the same way as the self-publishing of books. His "Accidentally Preserved" series and the two volumes of "Musty Suffer" short films have been welcomed by silent film fans and historians.

Another rather different Kickstarter campaign was related to the teen drama series Veronica Mars, which I saw an episode two of lately, only to buy the DVD set, and 62 episodes and a few weeks later I've just finished. Veronica Mars ran for three complete seasons between 2004 and 2007 before it was cancelled. Mars was a teenage girl (15 in the first series) who is the son of a P.I. and intent on finding the identity of the murderer of her best friend. Along the way, she solves a number of other, more trivial, cases. By the third season she had started at the local college and the story continued there. The murder story was completed at the end of season 1, with a rape case taking up season 2. Season 3 made the mistake of having 2 cases - one before the Christmas hiatus and one afterwards. Sadly, no-one came back after Christmas to see the start of the new case, ratings fell (possibly due to the new location as well), and the show was cancelled. Interestingly, another teen series around the same time, Kyle XY, also saw ratings fall sharply mid-season when it, too, tried having two separate narrative arcs, one each side of the hiatus. It, too, was cancelled after its third season.

The first thing to say is that Veronica Mars was actually rather good, placing itself nicely in the "teen noir" vogue of the time, perhaps epitomised best by the 2005 film "Brick." Yes, Mars was a series aimed at teenagers, but was certainly enjoyed by this 41 year old over the last few weeks. Interestingly, by moving the series to college, it also tried to grow up alongside its core audience, although that ultimately didn't work. The third season was also hampered by the lengthy writers strike in America, where a number of shows saw their seasons cut short by up to seven or eight episodes. VM was cut by just two, but the last four or five seemed like tagged-on individual stories which, while enjoyable enough, didn't see the season reaching any form of climax. indeed, the final episode about hazing seemed as if it was a season-long story squeezed into an hour long episode.

When the show was cancelled, the creator, Rob Thomas, did his best to get it brought back - not least by making a mini-episode to try to convince bosses to allow him to do a fourth season by skipping a few years and placing Veronica in the FBI. They said no, and that was probably a good decision. Despite its name, the series was about veronica and her friends, not just Veronica, and they would have been severely sidelined in the FBI scenario. Negotiations continued for several years.

In 2013, encouraged by fans, he started a Kickstarter campaign which, if successful, would see a feature-length movie made. The $2million target was reached within days, and ultimately $6m was raised. The film was made and released last year. And rather good it is too, wrapping the story up somewhat after the abruptly ended third season, but also making way for a new series or another film should that happen in the future. Luckily, most of the regular cast of the show hadn't been much older than the characters they were playing, and so didn't appear middle-aged in the new film, set seven years after the show ended. Rather interestingly, the film was also something of a first, being a mainstream film available for video-on-demand on the same day that it was released at the cinema. Not so unusual for indie films these days, but this ultimately distributed through Warner Bros.

My point here is that Kickstarter campaigns can be successful (very successful) but we have to remember that the material you want to work with has to be available for licensing, copyright free, or yours. This limits things remarkably within the Elvis world. Really, the only viable projects would be a documentary of some kind or a collection of audience-recorded footage from a concert - but even then synching this with audio wouldn't be possible because the music is owned by Sony, and they would have little or nothing to gain from this. There may well be good reasons why Kickstarter projects have never really taken off with regards to major artists - there is, alas, simply too much red tape.

[The Pirate]

ultimately $6 was raised.

Unless you meant six million, I'd say that's the lowest budget movie ever made.

Anyway, another project that has succeeded is the second attempt to get an Abba Recording Sessions book off the ground.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/abba-the-complete-recording-sessions

But only around 700 people have contributed, so this is going to be one very special, limited edition volume. It's basically 700 people paying an author to go ahead and research, then write, a book. Fortunately he has good credentials, and has been authorised to listen to the recordings in question, and like the DVD projects that have been mentioned there's no unknown quantities involved. Nothing to negotiate, no shady characters to buy from, and that's why this one has worked. Oh, and if anyone fancies contributing the campaign still has a few days left to run.

[poormadpeter]

ultimately $6 was raised.

Unless you meant six million, I'd say that's the lowest budget movie ever made.

Anyway, another project that has succeeded is the second attempt to get an Abba Recording Sessions book off the ground.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/abba-the-complete-recording-sessions

But only around 700 people have contributed, so this is going to be one very special, limited edition volume. It's basically 700 people paying an author to go ahead and research, then write, a book. Fortunately he has good credentials, and has been authorised to listen to the recordings in question, and like the DVD projects that have been mentioned there's no unknown quantities involved. Nothing to negotiate, no shady characters to buy from, and that's why this one has worked. Oh, and if anyone fancies contributing the campaign still has a few days left to run.

Oops! Well spotted!

Yes, books can also work in this way, and it has to be said that numerous theatre projects have as well. Depending on the book itself, unknown quantities sometimes are no longer a problem thanks to the Amazon print on demand service. But where this works for books that are mainly print rather than pictures, it doesn't work for books such as those produced by FTD, for example. The Abba book, looking at the sample pages, will be on high quality paper with colour pics etc, so yes you definitely need a known quantity to work to. But even for print works that can be print-on-demand, people forget how much money it can cost to research a book properly (depending on the book) - including travelling to archives, specific libraries etc.

[brian]

We should start Kickstarter to get Elvis in Concert officially released on DVD.

[The Pirate]

We should start Kickstarter to get Elvis in Concert officially released on DVD.

Fortunately it isn't lack of funds which is preventing it being released.

[The Pirate]

This is old news, but it's new to me and maybe others here.

http://www.startrekcontinues.com/episodes.html

Thanks to a Kickstarter campaign (which ended up far exceeding the required amount), a group of people have so far made three high quality episodes of a continuation series to the original Star Trek. They've even managed to get the son of James Doohan - the original "Scotty" - to reprise his late father's role!

Episodes can also be watched via the Vimeo app on Smart TVs.