Fundraising to make a film: Nova Scotia sketch troupe Picnicface want your dollars for perks
Industry Centre > Blogs > Fundraising to make a film: Nova Scotia sketch troupe Picnicface want your dollars for perks
Posted by Liz Hover
on Monday, August 09, 2010.
Categories: Film, Marketing, Digital media, Finance, NSI, Alumni
Writer, director and stand-up comic Andrew Bush and his sketch troupe, Picnicface, from Halifax, Nova Scotia are using
innovative ways to persuade us to donate to their feature film Roller Town. The film is being produced by NSI alumnus Jay Dahl.
In return for donating your dollars, the Picnicface gang will provide you with any number of a huge range of perks from an original poem ($10) to dying on screen in their movie ($100,000).
I whizzed off a bunch of questions to Andrew to find out more. First watch their pitch for donations then scroll down to read my Q&A with Andrew. The hilarious trailer for Roller Town is at the end of the interview.
Liz Hover: What is your role on Roller Town?
Andrew Bush: I’ll be directing and hopefully doing a cameo.
LH: Who else is involved? And what the heck is Picnicface?
AB: Picnicface is an eight person sketch troupe from Halifax, Nova Scotia. We’ve been working together for about three years now and have toured across Canada and the States.
In November 2011 we have a book coming out called Picnicface’s Canada published by Barnes and Nobel. We also have a sketch show in development with the Comedy Network.
Roller Town was written by me, Mark Little and Scott Vrooman. The film is being produced by Jay Dahl (NSI Drama Prize and NSI Totally Television grad) and Bill Niven with backing from Telefilm and Film Nova Scotia.
LH: Why did you decide to make a film?
AB: I’ve always been a fan of films from the 80s. They have a certain excitement to them that’s hard to find in movies these days. It’s also a style that goes well with our online shorts.
LH: How did the script come about?
AB: I think we first decided to write the script in a bar. I’d been watching a lot of trailers for rollerskating movies and thought: if we were ever going to make a movie as Picnicface, this should be its genre. Mark and Scott agreed and we wrote the entire script that night on a series of cocktail napkins.
Ok, that part is a lie but we really did think of it at a bar.
First we wanted to see if we could make the concept funny. So we shot a trailer for the movie before we even had a script. Once the trailer turned out well, we decided we had to make it into a film. At all costs. So we wrote and rewrote and rewrote some more. A year and a half later we had a script we thought was ready to show to people.
LH: What made you opt for this innovative fundraising method?
AB: We have a strong fan base online (about 60,000). We wanted to get the word out that we were making the film, but in a funny way. I’m not totally into asking for donations without giving anything back so we came up with this idea that we would give something back to our fans for every level of donation they give us. Anything's on the table. From a dollar to a million dollars. We’re still waiting on the million dollar donation. So far we’ve raised about $4,500 in the past two weeks.
LH: How did you decide on all the tiers/perks?
AB: It was random. Some we just made up on the spot while we were shooting and some we wrote down beforehand. When I went up, I made all of my prices really high because I’m busy prepping the film and making the promo shorts but the rest of Picnicface has been amazing. Mark has gotten about a dozen requests for ‘sexy raps’ (50 bucks a pop) and Bill Wood had dedicated a few poems to people as well. Our most popular is a credit in the film (20 bucks).
Watch the Roller Town trailer
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Views expressed here are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Screen Institute - Canada (NSI).
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The views expressed here are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Screen Institute - Canada (NSI).