Welcome to the Crowdsourcing Mornings segment! Every weekday morning, Geek Alabama talks about and features one crowdsourcing project from crowdsourcing sites such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and others. The hope with Crowdsourcing Mornings is to feature and help a project be successful and reach its fundraising goal. Please enjoy today’s featured project!
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Hello! We’re Manual Cinema, an Emmy Award-winning theater and film company based in Chicago. We combine handmade puppetry, animation and innovative sound and music to create immersive stories for stage and screen. Over the years, we’ve been incredibly lucky to work as animators, composers, and puppeteers on some incredible film projects, including the Jordan Peele-produced horror remake Candyman!
BUT, the financial realities of being an arts company has made it difficult to make a fully original short film of our own–one that showcases everything we can do and feels personal and urgent to us as a collective of artists. That’s why we need your support for our short film Future Feeling!
Part eco-fiction, part haunted-house tale, Future Feeling is the story of a family on the island of Nantucket bracing for a hurricane headed their way. As the storm comes closer and the power goes out, strange things begin to happen in the house that force the family to reimagine their relationship with nature and leaves them forever transformed in the process.
This film is inspired by several trips to Nantucket that we took over the past four years as part of the Almanack Arts Colony. We learned about the islands’ ecology and history, and were struck by the impacts of climate change that await the community.
Future Feeling is, in a sense, about climate change, but it’s not about the end of the world! We’re not interested in portraying some kind of climate apocalypse. Those kinds of stories often dull our imaginations and openness to living with climate change, not beyond it. Like the family in the film, Future Feeling is our attempt to feel our way through the dark–acknowledging darkness and loss, while still remaining open and full of imagination about how we can transform ourselves and our world.
This film will combine all the techniques we’ve developed over the years, using paper puppets, shadow puppetry, and immersive sound and music. It’s also a unique opportunity to experiment and elevate what we do best. We’ve used miniature sets before, but Future Feeling will have several intricately made miniature sets made out of paper and textiles. We want to explore even more expressive faces and animation, and create the most detailed and lush sound and music world we can, in 5.1 surround.
We’ve been developing and researching the story of Future Feeling for the past four years, and we’re currently in pre-production: storyboarding, writing music, and building the miniature world of the film. The funds from Kickstarter will allow us to move into full production on Future Feeling, with the goal of shooting in the first half of 2022 and finishing the film by the end of the year. Once the film is complete, we hope to screen Future Feeling at a top film festival and position ourselves for even more ambitious work in the future, like a feature-film or TV series.
All of the Kickstarter funds will go directly into the production values of the film: hand-crafted paper sets, articulated puppets, experimental lighting, a recording studio with live musicians, and a director of photography. Studio space to build and shoot the film represents a significant chunk of our overhead costs. Once the film is wrapped, a small amount of the funds will be used for marketing and getting Future Feeling seen by audiences far and wide.
As of December 30th, this project has raised $35,000 of their $30,000 goal. This project has 5 days left to raise as much as it can. For a pledge of $10, you will get one digital soundtrack. For a pledge of $25, you will get a digital screening of the film. To learn more and to pledge money, go to: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/manualcinema/future-feeling?
Categories: Crowdsourcing Mornings Stuff
