Kickstarter, or: Into the Belly of the Braff

The kickstarter for Mutwale is live and rolling along at a steady pace. The film is 25% funded!  I can't thank the backers enough- but the pledge rewards are starting to come in and this is great stuff.  The plush by The Amazing Owl has a prototype!

Am excite!  The eye piece will be bigger and possibly a diff't color, I'll talk to them about it.  But overall that is one fine lookin' pachyderm plush.

The tee designs are just about ready, so I'll put in an order for those next.  I've designed a poster as well, but I think it isn't quite the tone that represents the film, so I think it'll be a 'B-roll' poster that backers will get in digital form.

There's a lot of Zack Braffery going around reddit and the rest of the interwebs concerning the kickstarter for his next film. I won't get into it too much here; all I will say is that if you look at his kickstarter campaign, it starts with a quote from Thomas Edison.  Only a naive person would consider Edison worth quoting, but the quote is "there are no rules here, we're trying to accomplish something."  Really, Braff?  Edison destroyed Nikola Tesla's life and work with a selfish war of slander and backhanded tactics, he tried to kill cinema with a patent on his camera (thanks, Lumieres for inventing it first,) and he claimed credit for untold numbers of patents that were blatantly ripped off from other inventors.  Let's not forget that time he electrocuted a live elephant named Topsy to make it look like Tesla's Alternating Current was more dangerous than Direct Current.  (It's not.)  He constantly sold out to higher powers, and he helped bring about about industrialization with little to no thought about impact either to economy or to environment.  Edison was a dick. Anyone who doesn't think so is living in a third-grade stage-play.  So that quote about rules?  Yeah, Edison needed some, and so did the highly destructive post-industrial corporate sharktank he helped create.

So within 8 seconds of viewing Zach Braff's kickstarter I wanted to throttle his wonky face with a truncheon.  It had nothing to do with his film really, but people make a good point.  The implications of a Hollywood actor raising money on Kickstarter are many.  There's plenty of talk around the web, and the consensus seems to lean toward something like "This is not what Kickstarter is for."  By the way, no judgement here, but if it tells you anything further about the semi-controversy: Zach Braff is worth 22 million dollars.

I need to raise about 0.059% of that to make a movie.  Or, about 0.43% of what his campaign raised in 48 hours.  That's easy right?  TELL YOUR FRIENDS ^_^

We don't need much folks!

Project completed: VST GUI and Mutwale Kickstarter

It's been a long 5 or 6 weeks on these two projects.  The newest PluginGuru.com VST plugin has a nice working interactive GUI courtesy myself and a helpful programmer.  And of course the Guru, aka Skippy, who built the huge sample library.  It's available as a sample library in the audio industry staple Native Instruments Kontakt 5 sampler.  I think the Guru is trying to make the extension offical so that it can be used with the free Kontakt Player, but I won't have word on that for a while.  It may also be compatible with other soft-samplers, but that's out of my realm.  It's been a long on-and-off Photoshop adventure with 100+ layers, several tabs, animated knobs and buttons, and a luchador banging on drums with fiery drumsticks.  (Sadly the luchador himself was not part of my commission, not sure who drew him.) Fun stuff- but honestly I'm more excited about the new Plugin Guru intro animation, which was completed in March, but has been on hold for this VST to come out.  I'm pretty proud of the Guru intro- it's a solid piece of animation and it's my first lone-gun 2D commission.

And FINALLY, The Kickstarter for my film has been submitted for approval.  It takes a few days of review before I can launch.  It's been a lot of work, and I would describe it more but I'd like to think the effort is all up there on the page.  Here's to hoping!  I'll be back when it's live to talk about the process.