For sale: a warm fuzzy feeling
Jan Goodey on how to fund your film with friends
It has eco-credentials to satisfy even the sternest critics, but that's not all: the climate change docudrama The Age of Stupid has pioneered in the UK a funding and distribution technique that complements its subject matter all the way. The Age of Stupid is written and directed by activist filmmaker Franny Armstrong (who made the documentary McLibel), and has used a method called "crowd-funding" - a mixture of social events, mass email pleas and website donations. Like much in the world of eco-activism, crowd funding first emerged in the US, with radical film-maker Robert Greenwald famously raising $250,000 in 10 days for his 2006 film Iraq for Sale. "When we first showed our plans to our lawyer," says Armstrong, "he told us: 'It's the most original film funding scheme I've seen in 25 years working in the industry.'"
Aiming for a total budget of £465,000, Armstrong and producer Lizzie Gillett invited prospective backers to a London bar in December 2004; they raised £50,000 in one night. "It was quite frightening to stand up in Soho with a piece of paper and nothing to show," says Gillett. "With the £50,000 we said we'd make a trailer but ended up funding a year of filming with three of the characters." In 2006, they sold 40 more shares of £5,000 each. The remaining £215,000 came in over the next two years. The final chunk of funding arrived on the day the film was completed, just over a fortnight ago.
The Age of Stupid follows six sets of people affecting and affected by climate change: 82-year-old French mountain guide Fernand Pareau in the Chamonix valley, where the glaciers are melting; Jeh Wadia, who is starting up a low-cost Indian airline; Layefa Malemi, a wannabe medical student surviving in a Niger Delta village; lifelong Shell employee Alvin DuVernay, who rescued 100 people after Hurricane Katrina; Jamila and Adnan Bayyoud, Iraqi refugees whose father was killed on the Iraq war's second day; and wind-farm developer, Piers Guy, who is fighting Nimbys.
As well as feeling as if they are contributing to a worthwhile cause, the 258 backers of the film could actually get something back: any profits will be split between the film's contributors, its 105 crew (who worked for a third of the usual rate) and investors. A graph on the film-makers' website spells it out: £20 donors will receive a "warm fuzzy feeling", while those who gave £50,000 and upwards will get 2.5% of the profits and their name in the credit roll.
Armstrong believes she has a film that could never have been made had it been a traditional TV commission. "Crowd-funding means you have complete editorial freedom. There is no commissioning editor telling you to tone it down. You also have control of the distribution. When Channel 4 made a drama about the McDonalds libel case there was nothing the producer of their film could do to distribute it, whereas because I made my McLibel documentary independently, I was able to sell it wherever I wanted - and reached 22 million people."
Armstrong hopes The Age of Stupid will have a similar effect. It will be screened for the All-Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group on July 21, where she and Gillett hope to "positively influence" the final committee stages of the climate change bill before its third reading. Whatever happens in Westminster, the mass-mobilisation approach has worked beautifully. "One unsuspected advantage of being crowd-funded is that we have a support network of people all willing us on. Whenever we needed anything - from French translators, to a cottage to hide away in and write the script, or just sympathetic emails when we were struggling in Nigeria, it was on tap." Looks like the warm fuzzy feeling works both ways.
