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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If you haven’t already heard of the worldwide charity “Operation Smile”, please feel free to take a look at their website, they’ll do a far better job of explaining their mission than we will. But what we will do is tell the founder’s story.
Behind the Smile is a documentary-feature about the extraordinary, unconventional and wholesome lives of Kathy and Bill Magee. In a world of medical charities, Kathy Magee is giant. Which is ironic because she’s only 5’2”. Her dream of becoming a traveling nun was put on hold when she met the love of her life at the young age of 14. 60 years later, Kathy and Bill are thinking of retirement and handing off the reins of their multi-million dollar charity. But what does a massive handover like this entail? And who are these incredible people that built one of the world’s largest NGOs while maintaining a successful plastic surgery practice, raising 5 children, and somehow keeping a happy and healthy marriage?
The journey we’ve been on has been in the making for over a year. After successfully receiving a grant from the Utah Film Center, we began combing through 45 terabytes of archival footage on Operation Smile (manifesto videos, news footage, etc…). Hours, and days, and months were spent scrubbing through in efforts to find the best bits of insight into our subjects. Once these were earmarked, we packed our bags, drove down to Virginia, and began to capture Kathy & Bill through the lense of our documentary. We even got Bill to make us a cocktail.
We’ve put together our first trailer (above) to give you a minute sample of what we are aiming for in tone and content. All that’s left to do now is some additional shooting, which will happen this Fall, and then we are ready to hit post-production to piece it all together. And that’s where you, and your boundless generosity, come in.
Kickstarter is an incredible platform that gives creatives, like ourselves, freedom. With our end goal in mind, we (the Producers) are collecting the funds for our final shoot and post-production expenses.
Your generous donations will be used to make our film come to life. We have the best crew on hand to edit, mix sound, color, create foley, compose music, create graphics, etc. With your help, we’ll create a final product worthy of its subjects and give our team the time and resources they need to deliver it.
As of August 25th, this project has raised $200 of their $14,000 goal. This project has 17 days left to raise the $14,000 or it will not be funded. For a pledge of $5, you will get a social media shoutout. For a pledge of $50, you will get a digital download of the film. To learn more and to pledge money, go to: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/behindthesmile/behind-the-smile-documentary?
Categories: Crowdsourcing Mornings Stuff
