My Father's Son - Online Funding For Grass Roots Filmmaking

It's ex-Bookseller fortnight here on GMT, or so it seems. Following on from Pete Ashton last Monday, today we have Oliver Feldman for your delectation. Oliver, whom the London-based of you might have come across in his former guise as Foyles Computing Department Floor Manager, is putting together funding for a short film:

MY FATHER’S SON is a fifteen minute 16mm film in English and French, featuring three original songs. We are shooting on location in Paris during the last week of June with an Anglo-French cast and crew.

The film is scheduled to screen at Columbia University’s annual film festival in Los Angeles and New York, in May 2008. There will also be screenings in London and Paris, which we hope you will attend.

Oliver has become something of an Arts Entrepreneur since leaving bookselling. His first move saw him sidestep into journal publishing, masterminding the literary magazine Ephemera, ('A Magazine Worth Disagreeing With' as the slogan went) and now he's making this foray into Film Production. Ever sharp and not a little net-savvy, he and the production team have broken down the filmmaking process into small financial components, and have set up a Wedding List on the My Father's Son's web page where the general public can chip in toward equipment rental or to shell out for rolls of film. The clever thing is to make their financiers feel responsible for funding very specific functions within the production in order to feel a part of the process.

Oliver is very adept at appealing to the Arts Patron in you, the part that wants to help out because you know how much effort everyone is making. He knows there is a joy to be had in being in at the start of a new venture where an idea is seeded in the hope it might grow into something splendid, and a satisfaction in knowing that you helped cultivate that growth. Every project needs a champion like Oliver on board. The key to his persuasive tactics is to illuminate the project's grand themes in order to convince the non-believers of its value. He doesn't apologise for where the project comes from, (in this case, film school final year course work): instead he stresses what the project embodies: the creativity of diligent, dedicated professionals exposed on celluloid. His role is storytelling just as much as the writer's role is storytelling, except Oliver is telling the tale of how the film came into being, changing perceptions that this is not a low-rent, small time, college kid training exercise but a bone fide, ambitious, independent short film of the Auteur tradition. Creative people so often need someone outside their circle to tell their story for them: in my experience, (and I'm not necessarily talking about the creative element of this particular film) they are invariably terrible self-promoters, which is a problem when so often the difference between a project succeeding and failing is the quality (and in many case very existence) of their marketing. If you can't sell yourself, you're going to flounder. As the great man said, (me!) no one sings a song they don't know! Every project needs a public face, someone to drum up support not only at the box office, but in the early stages when there's nothing to show but an idea.

What Oliver and the production team are doing is getting themselves into a position just for the chance to make a film. All this effort just to get the pieces in place, all this faith in the creative powers of the director, actors and crew.

My Father's Son was written and will be directed by Nasheed Faruqi, another ex-Foyles bookseller:

NASHEED FARUQI (WRITER-DIRECTOR) was a member of The Children’s Film Unit from 1992 to 1996. She was educated at Wadham College, Oxford. Nasheed worked for Merchant Ivory Productions Ltd. (makers of A Room with a View and Howards End) on Le Divorce, Merci Docteur Rey and The Mystic Masseur. She is currently a graduate film student at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she has held a FOCUS fellowship. Her previous projects as writer director include Brunch (1994); Happy Birthday (2000); Liar (2002) and Alone Together (2005). MY FATHER’S SON will be her graduation film.

Bookselling is full of creative people chomping at the bit to get their chance, to get their break, to engineer their own opportunity. In every bookshop, you can almost guarantee there's at least one band, one novelist, one actress, one poet, one painter, one screenwriter, taking days off work to forge away at their craft, working every angle to get a gig, an agent, a contract. There are a lot of hopes and dreams behind the counter of your local Waterstones, Borders, Blackwells or Foyles etc.

So what has this to do with technology? It's this: the same spark that makes someone want to make a film is the same thing that makes someone want to build a Rails application: there's an idea in their head that they need to fulfill. It's all creativity, it's all human endeavour. And the same problems lie in wait for both the artist trying to sell their vision and the programmer taking their app out into the world for the first time. It's murder trying to get other people to believe in your project, to get them involved, to convince them to fund you, when all you want to do is to make things! Raising funds, glad-handling Angels, marketing your dream: these are horrible tasks for people whose only training is in the media or language they came from and whose only wish is to get behind the camera, easel or keyboard and build, build, build. Every great idea has to find a way out of the room in which it was incubated before it can become a reality, and sometimes, that's the hard part! The reason so many booksellers don't get the break they are after, the reason so many software projects will not get the roll-out they deserve is not because they aren't any good, (OK, sometimes because they aren't any good) but because no one knows about them. They're working alone, they aren't cut out for the dirty work of promoting their baby, and they don't know how to sell themselves. British reserve and European decorum - I love them, but they can kill a project stone dead if the creator isn't careful.

And that's the great thing about Minibar, GeekUp, Hack Day, every event we feature in the right hand column of GMT and every user group throughout the world: they get developers out there networking, talking, learning to present their ideas, meeting people. Representing your ideas is a skill that must be learned and which gets better with practice. In the absence of having someone like Oliver on your side, when a person has no choice but to sing their own praises, these tech events are gold dust. It's not about making a brash, arrogant idiot of yourself, but avoiding looking desperate and learning to tell your story confidently and clearly, and maybe with a little bit creativity in the telling.

It's about belief. In the case of My Father's Son, funding the film one crew member's meal at a time seems pretty heroic to me. It speaks of their determination to see the filmmaking process through, it makes it infinitely clear that the team are in it for real, it hints at the vital attention to detail. They believe this film is going to happen, and through their belief, they convince other people that it's going to happen. It's not a student film. It's a movie!