posted on Sep, 27 2005 @ 04:22 PM
My verbose two cents worth:
Securing funding isn’t hard, per se, but it IS a 6 a.m. to midnight seven days a week job, which means it takes funding to make funding, as you
still have to pay the rent while you're doing it.
That being said, there are two types of funding available: For Profit, and Not For Profit. For Profit is the most common type. Somebody invests in
you, and sometime later you give them their initial investment Plus a profit. (i.e. Wall Street or Hollywood) Yes, there is a risk that the stocks
will crash or the movie will be a flop, but the investor is going into the venture with the hopes of making a buck or two.
Not For Profit funding (i.e. the arts, PBS) comes from folks/corporations that either have so much money they need to get rid of some (for tax
purposes) or they want to tag their name to your product (Sesame Street is brought to you, in part, by McDonalds, that’s how cool we are) Obtaining
Not For Profit status is not easy, especially since the agency that can grant you said status (our government) will be the same agency your product
(the Disclosure Project) is going to slam. Get some cash to make a documentary on the life cycle of Alaskan Salmon? No problem. Get some cash to
make a documentary on who really killed JFK? Forget it.
Grant money is available for pretty much everything. Obtaining grant money is harder than breaking up big rocks into little rocks. Anybody can write
a grant, and there are more people writing grants than there are grants to be had, but it’s worth looking into.
I think your best bet would be Hollywood. They have the most money to burn and an established distribution system. Pick one of the better disclosure
witnesses, fictionalize their story, have a good screen writer come up with a script full of cloak and dagger suspense, car chases, some t and a, all
the Hollywood extras, and try to convince some studio that it will be a money maker. Call the film Disclosure Project (according to imdb, there’s
never been a film by that name, nor is there currently one in the works) Work with the screenwriters and designers to throw little tid-bits into the
background/character names/locations to help further public awareness…
Barring that, independent film would be my next choice. Less money, smaller distribution, but a chance at becoming a “cult classic” (people are
STILL watching Rocky Horror, all these years later *rolls eyes*)
Small potatoes but a great place to start with very little seed money is t-shirts(baseball caps, bumper stickers) I’ve made good money at this. A
high quality t-shirt with printing is only five bucks in bulk, sell ‘em for ten bucks, buy more t-shirts, etc. etc. I was doing rock concerts,
you’d probably want to hit Star Trek conventions (there’s one everyday somewhere in America) A good graphic designer is a MUST as there will be a
Lot of folks peddling merchandise.
Soliciting funding is a full time job, don’t expect this to be easy. My wife and I spent about 2000 man hours soliciting fifty thousand dollars for
a film project. If you do the math you can see that that is about the same as just getting a normal full time job. However, now that we’ve made
the contacts and started the ball rolling additional funding is becoming easier to get…
I wish you luck.