LOS ANGELES – The Kickstarter campaign for the “Kickstarted” documentary feature film will end at 9:08am EDT on Thursday, June 27, and right now, with over 500 backers, the film is approximately 50-percent funded. Going into their last days attempting to raise $85,000 to complete the film they’ve been working on for the past year, LA filmmakers Jay Armitage, Jason Cooper and Chris Gartin continue seizing every chance to demonstrate their passions and convictions, in the hope that the crowdfunding community will make their dream come true.
“We are documenting an important point in time,” Cooper began. “Right now, crowdfunding is drastically changing the way everything is funded; startups, art, film, music, charity projects… every type of entrepreneurial venture is turning to the crowd. Our movie is going to tell the best stories from this incredible space. We’ll follow small projects and big to show how much goes not only into funding a project, but what happens after… and how people deal with both success and failure. These are intimate profiles of the new American Dream at work.”
Each day the team is proving its value with prolific, timely educational projects that have already given-back immeasurably to the expanding crowdfunding community. Since releasing their first exclusive video interview with Zach Braff on May 8, they have produced and released a dozen more insightful videos, including an original “Funded in 60 Seconds” series, on their http://youtube.com/kickstartedmovie channel for free.
Yesterday they announced their 2012-13 Crowdfunding All Stars recognition program (http://bit.ly/cfallstar), honoring 24 campaigns from 14 different categories representing “the best stories from the crowdfunding world” with their own custom trading cards.
These initiatives and the documentary project itself have generated feature coverage in major media outlets ranging from Mashable.com to the Los Angeles Times and well beyond, but this week, the filmmakers earned starring mentions in breaking news coverage for their key role in stopping a fraudulent Kobe Beef Jerky campaign on Kickstarter.
“Since we helped save some people $120,000 by investigating and exposing the Kobe Beef Jerky scam, of course it will be great if everyone decides that’s a good reason to fund our film,” Armitage admitted. “We remain focused on telling personal crowdfunding stories, good and bad. That one is definitely part of our journey, and there are also a lot of inspiring ones we’ll present in our film.”
The “Kickstarted” filmmakers have interviewed scores of crowdfunding newsmakers like Braff, Amanda Palmer, Maxwell Salzberg, Lisa Fetterman, John Vanderslice, Brian Fargo and many, many others, and these efforts will continue to play out until the film is completed. As a participating member in Kicking It Forward, if the Kickstarter campaign is successful, Cooper, Armitage and Gartin have vowed to give five percent of any profits back to other crowdfunding projects.
Please consider offering your support to their Kickstarter campaign at http://bit.ly/KickKS.
ABOUT KICKSTARTED
Kickstarted is an in-production documentary feature film about the crowdfunding boom. We’ve been interviewing major crowdfunding project creators and following the progress of everyday people who are using crowdfunding to pursue their dreams. Future videos will include crowdfunding best practices and interviews with Amanda Palmer, Brian Fargo, Chris Roberts, and many more. http://www.kickstartedmovie.com
