The Tunnel goes live
Today’s the day the world finds out if The Tunnel is a clever fundraising/distribution idea, or a clever fundraising/distribution idea with an accomplished film attached to it. Oscar winning producer, Ted Hope (21 Grams, Adventureland) thinks the latter.
The film, written and produced by Enzo Tedeschi and Julian Harvey and directed by Carlo Ledesma, had its world premiere at Popcorn Taxi last night, followed by Q&A with the afformentioned creators as well as executive producer Andrew Denton.
I’m very, very interested to see what happens with this film and wish every success to all the people involved.
This is a FANTASTIC way to LOSE money!!
The small amounts they’ll earn from Oz DVD sales, Showtime and “frame sales ($12K)” will probably barely cover 30% of their budget.
The only way this will work is if they get a US and UK distribution deal.
I offer the best of luck to these filmmakers – we Aussies really need to give our industry a reboot, and zany new ideas are to be encouraged.
Having said that, I’m very, very skeptical of how many projects can successfully find funding in this way from the general public. People tend to be pretty generous when giving money to actual charities, but for indulgences like filmmaking and the arts, I think the public’s willingness to be involved is close to zero-point-zero – especially given they retain none of the equity split if the film makes a profit. What’s really in it for them?
After The Tunnel and Iron Sky have all blown over, give it maybe one to two years tops, and I think the internet-savvy public are going to be disillusioned about giving their dosh away to films. Before this form of funding can even get to it’s feet, the whole market for it will be extinguished by a flood of young inexperienced amateurs who try to take advantage, and will end up wasting a lot of people’s money.
I think the guys from The Tunnel are not the types who would take advantage – the production values speak well for their professionalism – but whether success follows for them I think is really up in the air, and crowdfunding is not going to be able to prop up a whole industry – it’ll only be able to support the very occasional, one-of-a-kind idea. At the time of writing, crowd-funding has raised 500,000 Euros for Iron Sky online, but really, how long can this possibly go on for? We can look forward to hundreds of competing second and third-rate ideas popping up looking for $0.5m here, $1m there, $80k here.
It might get to a point in a year or two where it costs $100k in seed funding just to even put together an impressive enough website, trailer, and blog to grab anyone’s attention, let alone their money.
Has anyone else been thinking the same way or am I alone here? Speak up.
Anyway, good luck all the same to Tedeschi and co.
Hey James,
Thanks for your comments and good wishes.
The way we see it, the money is going to need to come from the public whichever way you do it – be it via box office receipts, traditional DVD sales, VOD sales or any other way that traditionally-funded movies are exploited. The money still needs to be recouped to cover investment.
The only difference in our model is we asked people to pay their money before the movie was made, based on the fact it was something they wanted to see.
And Dean, I’m not sure where you got the figure of $12K from, but we are currently at a frame-count of almost 38K, and spiking now that the film has released, not to mention DVD sales, donations via the Vodo.net platform and other sales and prospects
Wether the project loses money or not remains to be seen, but it is currently a promising outlook. It may not be THE way, but it’s A way that seems to be working for us and our humble movie.
Thanks for engaging with the project, guys.
This A student film.
With all the unintesting values of self-indulgence. It is a 30 Min short film stretched to 90mins. With the lazy film-makers tool :- voice over.
Stand back and look at it: boring, unintesting, one-dimensional characters, the cornerstone of our Aussie Fim-making. Lets all lean from this; remember “Story is King.”