The question is a difficult one to answer. I have to make that assumption, based on what I know—which is mostly that I think they’ve been made by people who are trying to make stuff, and it’s pretty difficult to make a film by yourself. A little more difficult is telling whether they’re making a film, or a part, or a whole. We have a lot of resources at our disposal, and that’s partly through direct sales and partly through online platforms like Kickstarter, which can be hard to gauge what’s actually making money. We also have a wealth of knowledge about what we’re doing and what we’re making, and a lot of it’s being spread out over the web. When you start tracking where the money is coming from, it’s pretty hard to get an exact grasp of where the revenue is coming from.
So I don’t have any stats, or anyone will tell me I did.
We know what’s making money. We don’t have a precise number, but we’re pretty confident that if everybody’s paying 10% or 15%, if we’re doing a film this year, you’d think that’s at least going to cover our costs. So it’s possible that this number, which seems pretty high to me, for what I think people are making, probably feels a lot less real.
I don’t know if this could be a really good or kind of interesting thing to say to people about the filmmaking scene. What is it about indie filmmaking?
I think it makes a lot of assumptions. You have people who say they’re indie and make films, so what’s the problem? And they don’t think of themselves as independent. But it seems like a lot of that stuff we hear about, it’s really just the opposite: people who claim to be indie and are not, and people who are not really independent who make a lot of stuff that’s really not indie, and that’s one of the things I like about it the most because I think it’s really exciting when it comes to seeing the real numbers. I’m glad that’s a thing to recognize because that’s the last thing I’m seeing a lot of and it’s not really a thing, so it’s a neat thing to be able to share that with people.
You also want to make a point about crowdfunding, about trying to break the business model. What does crowdfunding mean as a concept? And what kind of money can someone be making?
First off,
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