 "Mass produced")
The World Before Her, Indo-Canadian filmmaker Nisha Pahuja's incendiary documentary, was recently nominated for an Emmy Award in the Outstanding Coverage of a Current News category. The feature-length film that has won international acclaim at film festivals saw a limited theatrical release in India earlier this year after wrapping up a wildly successful crowdfunding campaign via the global platform, Kickstarter. The documentary raised 57,290 Canadian dollars (approximately Rs 31 lakh) with the support of 382 backers from across the world. Pahuja plans to use this money to screen the film in schools, universities, villages and NGOs.
Many creative artists within India and abroad now resort to generating funds through this medium, with various crowdsourced projects having been released in the last three to four years. Leading the charge was maverick Bollywood filmmaker Onir who crowdfunded his anthology film 'I Am' through Facebook and Twitter campaigns in 2010 by offering backers co-production credit and a share in the profits. Internationally, the campaign by Zach Braff (star of the hit medical sitcom Scrubs) for his second directorial venture, Wish I Was Here, raised a sum of $3.1 million last year. The trend is not relegated to arthouse fiction or documentary Hindi/English films. Pawan Kumar's Lucia was the first Kannada film to be crowdfunded in 2011. Within the country, there is a section of the audience that is growing weary of the unstoppable spew of the Rs 100-crore formulaic blockbusters. By supporting these experimental pursuits determined to break out of the crowd-pleasing mould, cinephiles hope to change India's current cinematic landscape, slowly but surely.
For the uninitiated, crowdfunding is usually carried out on websites that provide a platform for people to network, and depends on the kindness of friends, family and strangers to raise the capital required for a creative project. Few people realise that crowdsourcing has been around for almost a century. According to Pune-based filmmaker Prathamesh Krisang, Dadasaheb Phalke, the father of Indian cinema, crowdsourced his (and India's) first feature film, Raja Harishchandra - his pitch to impress friends and other potential financiers was a time-lapse video of a plant that was made to grow in front of a steady camera for days. Almost 500,000 members of the Gujarat Milk Cooperatives gave Rs 2 each towards the production of Shyam Benegal's Manthan in the '70s. Krisang himself has just concluded a campaign for his upcoming film on extremism in Assam, One Last Question, on the Indian crowdfunding platform Wishberry, raising his target amount of Rs 5 lakh through 63 contributors. As it also creates a buzz on social media, estimates suggest that for every dollar contributed to your project you save $10 on marketing it.
Preserving creative integrity in a world dominated by major studios is another factor leading to crowdsourcing. For Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla, raising funds for the post-production of their film, Proposition for a Revolution, a documentary on the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), was fraught with dilemmas. "Those who were interested in investing wanted to know if the film was pro-AAP or anti-AAP. We didn't want to take money from such people because that would compromise our position," they say. Running short of choices in the beginning, they eventually raised Rs 15 lakh through crowdsourcing. Gaurav Raturi, a digital marketing manager with lifestyle brand Happily Unmarried, contributed the token amount of Rs 500 towards their campaign after he came across their pitch video on the social media. Having contributed to other projects before, Raturi's interest was spiked when he saw that Anand Gandhi, the director of Ship of Theseus, had come on board as a producer. Ashutosh Kumar, who runs Jagriti Yatra, a non-profit organisation, contributed Rs 1,10,000 towards Krisang's venture. Kumar was motivated by the "socially conscious" bent of Krisang's film.
Dubey explains that the returns to investors are of two types - rewards based and equity based. The usual incentives in a rewards-based campaign range from Thank You messages on social media to exclusive footage, customised merchandise, free DVDs and so on. Filmmakers stress that the key is to be innovative with the incentives offered. "The best incentives are personal, exclusive and experiential and not necessarily ones that have an equivalent monetary value," says Monga. For instance, four donors who contributed 250 Canadian dollars each to Pahuja's campaign were given a chance to attend an intimate screening of The World Before Her hosted by Kashyap.
However, there are many legal and logistical considerations to keep in mind whilst preparing a campaign. Some platforms such as Wishberry have an all-or-nothing policy, wherein if you fail to raise your target amount, you get no money at all. Onir, who is in Delhi shooting his next venture, Shab, shares that though his experience was overall a positive one because he went on to make the film (I Am received the National Awards for the Best Feature Film in Hindi), he might not go through the whole "campaign hog" again. "Crowdfunding is difficult since our country isn't very charitable. We don't see cinema as a piece of art." To compound matters, "the tax system in India is very archaic and complicated," says Onir. The Securities and Exchange Board of India stipulates that individuals or organisations cannot ask for funds in exchange for monetary returns unless they are registered as a public limited company. Even then, he says, 37-42 per cent of the money raised gets used up in paying different kinds of taxes.
Still, the potential crowdsourcing holds for the future of independent cinema in India has only begun to be tapped. As Ranka and Shukla say, crowdsourcing "creates pockets of intimacy and directness between the artist and the audience".
Many creative artists within India and abroad now resort to generating funds through this medium, with various crowdsourced projects having been released in the last three to four years. Leading the charge was maverick Bollywood filmmaker Onir who crowdfunded his anthology film 'I Am' through Facebook and Twitter campaigns in 2010 by offering backers co-production credit and a share in the profits. Internationally, the campaign by Zach Braff (star of the hit medical sitcom Scrubs) for his second directorial venture, Wish I Was Here, raised a sum of $3.1 million last year. The trend is not relegated to arthouse fiction or documentary Hindi/English films. Pawan Kumar's Lucia was the first Kannada film to be crowdfunded in 2011. Within the country, there is a section of the audience that is growing weary of the unstoppable spew of the Rs 100-crore formulaic blockbusters. By supporting these experimental pursuits determined to break out of the crowd-pleasing mould, cinephiles hope to change India's current cinematic landscape, slowly but surely.
For the uninitiated, crowdfunding is usually carried out on websites that provide a platform for people to network, and depends on the kindness of friends, family and strangers to raise the capital required for a creative project. Few people realise that crowdsourcing has been around for almost a century. According to Pune-based filmmaker Prathamesh Krisang, Dadasaheb Phalke, the father of Indian cinema, crowdsourced his (and India's) first feature film, Raja Harishchandra - his pitch to impress friends and other potential financiers was a time-lapse video of a plant that was made to grow in front of a steady camera for days. Almost 500,000 members of the Gujarat Milk Cooperatives gave Rs 2 each towards the production of Shyam Benegal's Manthan in the '70s. Krisang himself has just concluded a campaign for his upcoming film on extremism in Assam, One Last Question, on the Indian crowdfunding platform Wishberry, raising his target amount of Rs 5 lakh through 63 contributors. As it also creates a buzz on social media, estimates suggest that for every dollar contributed to your project you save $10 on marketing it.
Preserving creative integrity in a world dominated by major studios is another factor leading to crowdsourcing. For Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla, raising funds for the post-production of their film, Proposition for a Revolution, a documentary on the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), was fraught with dilemmas. "Those who were interested in investing wanted to know if the film was pro-AAP or anti-AAP. We didn't want to take money from such people because that would compromise our position," they say. Running short of choices in the beginning, they eventually raised Rs 15 lakh through crowdsourcing. Gaurav Raturi, a digital marketing manager with lifestyle brand Happily Unmarried, contributed the token amount of Rs 500 towards their campaign after he came across their pitch video on the social media. Having contributed to other projects before, Raturi's interest was spiked when he saw that Anand Gandhi, the director of Ship of Theseus, had come on board as a producer. Ashutosh Kumar, who runs Jagriti Yatra, a non-profit organisation, contributed Rs 1,10,000 towards Krisang's venture. Kumar was motivated by the "socially conscious" bent of Krisang's film.
Dubey explains that the returns to investors are of two types - rewards based and equity based. The usual incentives in a rewards-based campaign range from Thank You messages on social media to exclusive footage, customised merchandise, free DVDs and so on. Filmmakers stress that the key is to be innovative with the incentives offered. "The best incentives are personal, exclusive and experiential and not necessarily ones that have an equivalent monetary value," says Monga. For instance, four donors who contributed 250 Canadian dollars each to Pahuja's campaign were given a chance to attend an intimate screening of The World Before Her hosted by Kashyap.
However, there are many legal and logistical considerations to keep in mind whilst preparing a campaign. Some platforms such as Wishberry have an all-or-nothing policy, wherein if you fail to raise your target amount, you get no money at all. Onir, who is in Delhi shooting his next venture, Shab, shares that though his experience was overall a positive one because he went on to make the film (I Am received the National Awards for the Best Feature Film in Hindi), he might not go through the whole "campaign hog" again. "Crowdfunding is difficult since our country isn't very charitable. We don't see cinema as a piece of art." To compound matters, "the tax system in India is very archaic and complicated," says Onir. The Securities and Exchange Board of India stipulates that individuals or organisations cannot ask for funds in exchange for monetary returns unless they are registered as a public limited company. Even then, he says, 37-42 per cent of the money raised gets used up in paying different kinds of taxes.
Still, the potential crowdsourcing holds for the future of independent cinema in India has only begun to be tapped. As Ranka and Shukla say, crowdsourcing "creates pockets of intimacy and directness between the artist and the audience".