The star of our show

Production update

Hi everyone! We just wanted to provide an update on what’s being going on with the project since we closed funding in May. As we said, we intend to shoot five films over the summer so that we can launch in the fall. As of today, we’ve shot four of the five films, with three shot just this week! We shot Clara and the Trolls in June and July, and this week we shot The Boy and the Tengu, The Tale of Two Brothers and Stinky (click those links to see previews of each of the films on our YouTube channel). Clara and the Trolls is now edited and narrated, and our composer is about 75% done with the music. Next up, we have to edit and narrate the three films we shot this week, which will be a lot of work.

We want to thank the amazing people who helped us shoot all these films – not least all our child actors and narrators. Jennie Brown, our producer, has done amazing work over the past couple of months organizing everything, recruiting other crew members and generally keeping us all moving forward. We could not have done any of this without her. For our Clara and the Trolls shoot, we had help from Babetta and Cameron Kelly, two family members, and also from Leah McBride, who was our ‘baby wrangler’ – a crucial role when you’re shooting with kids. Katie Hill directed our Two Brothers shoot, while Casey Wilson and Spencer Scanlon took the lead on photography and lighting respectively. Kevin Kelly directed our Tengu shoot and David Stauffer led photography, while the moms of our Japanese kids helped us translate lines and directions during the shoot. Gina Thompson handled props and Brynn Zimmer tackled wardrobe for both of these shoots and did an amazing job. Fred and Ranleigh Johnson rigged up some very special effects for a crucial scene in the Two Brothers film. Kate Clarke and Aya Watanabe were fantastic wranglers and assistants on the Tengu shoot. Khaliel Kelly made food for both the Tengu and Two Brothers shoot. All these amazing people worked for free just because they believe in our project. Dallin Blankenship helped make amazing sets and costumes for our Tengu shoot. Continue Reading

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First day of shooting for Clara and the Trolls

The first film we’re going to be shooting is Clara and the Trolls, although we’ll probably start with one of the other films when we launch in the Fall. We’re doing two main shooting days for this film, and we had the first one yesterday, which went great. We thought you might like to see some pictures from our day of shooting. You can also follow along on Instagram if you’d like to see more like this over the coming months as we shoot the rest of the films (we’ll also post them on our Facebook page from time to time).

First, we got our little house all set up and ready to go:

Then we got two of our little stars all kitted out in their costumes:

Then we started shooting:

Every now and then we took a break on these great chairs our ‘baby wrangler’ brought with her:

And, of course, the owl is back, and bigger than ever!

 

 

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New Kickstarter campaign

Hello everyone,

As you may have noticed, our first Kickstarter campaign expired on Monday this week, and although 75 wonderful people had pledged a grand total of $4,727, this was well short of the $30,000 goal we set for our campaign. As a result, none  of the pledges went through.

So, we’ve immediately started another Kickstarter, which went live earlier today, to raise a much smaller amount of money. We’ve set the target low – $3,000 – to be sure to hit it, but we’d very much like to match and even exceed the $4,727 we had pledged to the last project.

We’re asking everyone who pledged to the last one to pledge the same amount again on this project. We’re also hoping that anyone who decided not to pledge last time around because the goal seemed unachievable will pledge this time, since we’re much more likely to hit our goal (we’re already at almost 50% just a few hours after launching). We’re running this project for just 7 days, so please pledge today if you can.

In other news, we start shooting Clara and the Trolls this Friday, so we’re moving forward with our plans despite not having closed funding yet. We secured another source of funding this past week, which together with the Kickstarter should help us have enough for the next five films.

We look forward to sharing more progress with you in the near future.

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An outpouring of support

This week has been amazing, because we’ve seen a huge swell of interest and support in our project. On Monday, the Daybook Blog wrote about our project and linked to our site and Clara Tale.  As a result, we had literally thousands of new visitors to our site, and thousands of views of Clara Tale and our other videos on YouTube. This chart from our YouTube stats kind of says it all (we hit 10,000 total views some time this evening):

Having said that, the Daybook Blog is just one of quite a number of blogs that have linked to us, and they’ve all sent wonderful people our way. And it’s not all about the numbers – which really just represent the interest in what we’re doing and real people who like it and want to see more of it. What’s been most wonderful is seeing the words not only these bloggers but also their followers have used to talk about our project. For example, check out the comments on that Daybook Blog post. We love hearing this – making people happy and giving them something they can enjoy and their kids can watch over and over without any guilt is a big part of the reason why we’re doing this. The comments on our Facebook page and on our YouTube videos are equally inspiring.

We want to say thank you to all of you and to all of those who have written about our project, shared it on Facebook, left one of these kind comments on someone else’s blog or otherwise shown their support (not least by backing our Kickstarter project). Your support has made us even more excited to make more of these films and continue to develop the other important parts of our project, like our art-based activities and the film academy for kids we’re planning (more on that soon). So thank you, and please keep coming back to hear the latest news.

 

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Update on our Kickstarter campaign

Hi all

Some of you may be following along with our Kickstarter project. Perhaps you’ve even made a pledge – if so, thank you! We have over 50 backers now, who have given everything from $2 to $500, and we’re grateful for every one.

If you are following along on Kickstarter, on Facebook, on Twitter or on YouTube, you’ll have seen some of our updates there. But in case you haven’t we wanted to give you a quick update of what we’ve been up to.

Firstly, here’s a video of our kids reacting to the latest pledges on the campaign. They get so excited and it kind of blows their minds that so many people are watching the videos and wanting us to make more:

Secondly, we’ve been posting previews of the next five fairytales we plan to make. We’re embedding here a playlist that includes all these videos (and will be updated as we complete the set later this week):

Subscribe to our channel on YouTube, follow us on Twitter, or Like us on Facebook, to make sure you stay up to date with the latest from the project. And please share the project with your friends too.