We’ve all bitched about how the movie studios don’t seem to get the internet, spending millions taking people who torrent their film to court. A couple of Aussie filmmakers have decided to turn the film making process on its head by getting its audience to buy frames from its movie in advance, in order to raise the $135,000 needed to create the film. They’ll then release it on the web for free.
So far, Julian Harvey and Enzo Tedeschi from Distracted Media have raised almost $7,500 from people on the net as part of the 135K project. Each frame is on sale for $1, and with 25 frames per second, you can opt to easily purchase a single frame, a second of the movie, two seconds or a full minute (or you can decide your own quantity as well). Payments are made through PayPal and upon release, you’ll get a digital copy of the frame you purchased.
It’s a really interesting way to not only raise money to make the film, but also to tackle the issue of piracy. The movie’s website explains the approach really well:
The Internet was meant to be a tool to connect us. It was meant to break down borders and liberate. Now we have an entire generation who are being labelled criminals for using that tool. But perhaps rather than wasting millions of dollars fighting a losing battle against internet piracy, we should try and find a way to embrace the possibilities that this new world brings…
That’s the thought that inspired this project. We believe that if we stop fighting the peer to peer networks, they could become the biggest revolution we have ever seen in the way we share entertainment and information.
After spending years being frustrated by what we saw as the movie industry’s short-sighted and conventional outlook towards the online community, we decided it was time to try something different – The 135K Project was born.
We figured that movie posters and collectable frames from movies are being sold every day, so what if we could raise the money to make “The Tunnel” by selling every individual frame of it? We would be able to make a movie unencumbered by a studio’s need for box office. We could do what we got into the industry to do in the first place. Tell stories we like and get them out there so people could enjoy them.
What’s the key to doing that? You.
If you like the look of “The Tunnel” or the idea behind The 135K Project – buy a frame or two, blog about it, follow us on twitter, seed and embed the finished film when it’s released. Whatever you can do. It will all help and show the world there might just be another way. Who knows where that might lead?
If you’ve ever torrented a film, or even just wondered at the studios’ approach to suing potential customers, you owe it to yourself to buy at least one frame of this movie. And if guilting you into doing it isn’t enough, the filmmakers have stated that upon release, they’ll pick a single frame from the movie at random, and whoever bought that frame will get 1% of the profits made from the film.
[The Tunnel – Thanks Ahmed!]