Just as Michael Moore held church-bingo games to pay for
Roger & Me, Halifax independent filmmakers find that
creative financing and fundraising—the least exciting but most
necessary of movie-making endeavours—is a rite of passage en route to
completing their latest projects.
North Sydney native and current Dartmouth actor and filmmaker Mike
Ratchford is currently cobbling together money to produce one of his
varying projects, which range from the comedy short Shit
Disturber to the vampire drama Final Temptation. His
fundraising drive began with collecting bottles and cans from his
family in Cape Breton and expanded from there to his friends here in
Dartmouth and Halifax.
“When I first put the email out, I got 20 responses,” he says. “So I
got my own mini-van to go to pick it all up and I’m picking up more
people as I go along.”
For Ratchford, who caught the acting bug when working on an
independent film in Sydney, the entrepreneurial spirit of his bottle
scheme was born out of the piecemeal nature of acting work.
“Actors are all self-employed and kind of entrepreneurs, in a
sense,” he says. “They’re always out networking and making contacts,
making a business for themselves. This fundraising aspect—if you have
a passion for acting and filmmaking—just adds to it.”
NSCC film school graduate and Video Difference supervisor Colin
MacDonald has been incorporating 50/50 draws, offering up producer
credits for cash and planning Local is the Word—a June 10th benefit
film screening and silent art auction—into his pre-production for
Withered Dead, a family drama with zombies, going before the
camera in Stellarton this July.
MacDonald has found that advertising locally for donations netted
him some money but also yielded the happy benefit of drawing
movie-minded people into his network, increasing his profile within the
Halifax film community.
“I just had this desire to do this film on my own and get it done
and whatever I had at the end, I had. I didn’t think I had enough to go
out there and bring people on board. But with the community around here
being what it is, bringing people on board has happened without me even
doing it. Through the little bit of advertising I’ve done for my
fundraising, I’ve been getting all these contacts from people.”
Indeed, MacDonald has received emails from people offering to
compose music for his film, to another offering to go out there and
help him finance it. “I’ve had a lot of people contacting me and
wanting to help out,” MacDonald says. “Maybe around here that’s the way
it works.”
On top of the achievement of independently financing a film, there
is the unanticipated result of beginning new relationships within the
film community, for which MacDonald seems genuinely grateful.
“The amount of people I’ve talked to through this—indie producers,
indie filmmakers—that I’ve never had the opportunity to meet in any
of my other work; they’ve come at it with such enthusiasm that I can’t
wait to get them on board.”
Chris Cuthbertson’s personal lore includes the typical trope of
indie financing (relying heavily on one’s credit card), but he also
moved his wife and young family, along with his filmmaking partners, to
Halifax from Vancouver to make movies full time. One of his savings-
and card-financed projects was a 16mm trailer for A Bug and a Bag of
Weed, shot in Vancouver before the move out east. Four years later
in 2006, Bug debuted at the Atlantic Film Festival as a feature,
made with assistance from Telefilm and Film Nova Scotia, among
others.
His story, like the best of fundraising tales, hints at the extreme
dedication it takes to see a project to completion. And there are
sacrifices that don’t seem as much like sacrifices when all is said and
done: Cuthbertson sold his expensive BMW, purchasing a Dodge Ram Van to
haul gear.
“It meant a lot and I enjoyed driving it,” Cuthbertson says of his
Beemer, “but at the end of the day, this, making movies, was more
important.”
Local is the Word, Wednesday, June 10 at the Burke Building, Theatre A, 5932 Inglis, 7pm, $6.
This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2009.