Funding Strategy

When we first uncovered the story of Sandgrains and realized the public interest it would have, we immediately thought about the Internet and its capacity to spread an important message that would otherwise remain hidden. Further, we wanted to harness the revolutionary potential it presented for funding, where, through a system of micro-finance, the audience actually participate in helping make the story a reality.

Upon begining the adventure of financing this project we knew that the chances of finding backing, for what was little more than an idea, would be remote. We wanted to look instead at building a network of supporters that could help kickstart the infrastructure needed to enable the films development. With a base of both funds and a community creating audience, the project would look more appealing to traditional funding bodies and other philanthropic associations who might want to help support the project.

To make Sandgrains with the traditional funding model we would be looking at raising £120.000. The full budget has been carefully compiled accounting for production costs, wages, post-production facilities and many other things which you can check out here.

However such a budget is almost impossible to get in current times, so we created a step by step funding and production scheme that would allow us to concentrate on specific production elements. We have successfully crowdfunded finances for production in Cape Verde, which is scheduled for January and February 2012.

At this stage we are crowdfunding £3580, which will pay for production in Sweden and Brussels and for the editor to start working on the final piece. See the graphic below for details on the Second Phase of our Crowdfunding budget.

The more you can help us to raise the better the production value will be. In this budget we accounted for the minimum funding needed but if we could raise more everything would be easier. We plan to sleep on friends' couches and keep travel costs to a minimum. The Crowdfunding Budget does't account for our own wages. We decided that everything we can get will be put into live costs. We invest our own time because it is a story we believe in. We do have to account for the editor costs because we do not have an internal editor.

The Crowdfunding Phase 1 has raised £10,833 (€13,072), here below the details of what has been funded for.

We are using a whole new way of going about film funding and production. We break down everything in humble steps so that we can realistically achieve them one at a time, and it's not something only for accountants to understand, even you can now understand and follow up on how money is made and spent for a feature documentary film production.

The traditional funding strategy alone has not been helpful for other projects in the past and we believe that a new model can be created.
Below is a graph by Robert Pratten (CC by-sa) explaining how the new model works.