If you aren’t already familiar with it, Kickstarter is a new platform (founded in 2009, by Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, and Charles Adler) for funding all kinds of arts and creative projects. K and H of Kegels for Hegel wanted $500 to put on a performance, Rob Thomas & Kristen Bell of Veronica Mars got $5.7 million to make a movie. Lots of people dream up Performance, Installation, Music, Video, Fashion, Dance, Craft, Design, and Game projects for all kinds of funding amounts in-between.
Your Mission
It’d be great for you to do your own Kickstarter campaign. Some of you may do that in the years to come. Some of you may do it this semester for EC. But for our Arts Funding Week, I’m only asking you to surf around and learn a bit about what other Art, Design, Culture, Technology, and Creativity types have come up with.
If you surf the Kickstarter website for a while you will probably find some projects that really grab you! And some that really don’t. What’s the difference? Is it the eye contact in the pitch video? Is one too serious? One to silly? One just right? Is it the details of the planning?
Kickstarter lists projects in 15 different areas:
- Art
- Comics
- Crafts
- Dance
- Design
- Fashion
- Film & Video
- Food
- Games
- Journalism
- Music
- Photography
- Publishing
- Technology
- Theater
Surf
Please pick any TWO areas you like. For each of your 2 areas, find 2 pitch videos: one that you think really rocks and one that you think is lame. Copy the embed code and paste each of your 4 videos on a blank, new line in your blog post.
Blog
For your write up, talk about how the videos compare. For example they’re both Dance videos, one from LA and one from NY and they both want about $5,000 for their dance production project. Yet one totally sells you and the other you don’t really care about. Why? How do these artists of Dance or Film or Games or Technology use the art of communication to enlist you on their team, or fail to?
Extra Credit
If you want to dive deeper into Kickstarter, here are some options.
Hypothetical Video
If you make a Kickstarter pitch video for a project you “might” do someday, I’ll give you up to +15 points EC.
Real Campaign
If you launch a Kickstarter campaign for real, by March 31, I’ll give you up to +30 points EC.
Show me the money!
If your Kickstarter campaign is fully funded by April 30, I’ll give you up to another +30 for up to a total of +60 points EC.
Samples
Here are a couple more Kickstarter pitch videos that I thought were interesting. There’s thousands and thousands more!
John O’Nolan
As you know, we’re using WordPress to create our websites. One of the (many) WordPress developers, John O’Nolan, had an idea for a new blogging platform he called Ghost. Here’s his pitch to launch his new platform:
Neal Stephenson
Legendary cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson felt that all the game controllers he could find were lame for sword fighting games. So he appealed to fans to create a controller that was more like sword fighting:
Ladies of Hip-Hop Festival
Many Kickstarter projects deliver objects. Like a pair of shoes or an iPhone accessory. For a small pledge you might get a postcard or a poster. For more they’ll send you an ice chest. One of the many things I love about The Ladies of Hip-Hop Festival campaign is that it’s entirely object free. Their rewards are all intangible, ephemeral experiences like a “Digital Photo Book,” or “Skype Coffee with the Crew.”
Stephen Glassman
About as far as you can get from a sword fighting game, Los Angeles artist Stephen Glassman has a vision, a little bit in the spirit of rewilding, to turn an urban billboard into a small bamboo forest:
Rachel Eva & Shawn Michael
San Diego, CA artists Rachel Eva and Shawn Michael asked for funding to develop their Electricity in Art: Sculptural Lighting project:
Dong-Ping Wong, Oana Stanescu, Archie Lee Coates IV & Jeff Franklin
I’ll leave you with the remarkably ambitious + POOL, Tile by Tile from Dong-Ping Wong, Oana Stanescu, Archie Lee Coates IV & Jeff Franklin.
