Hey Everyone!
Thanks once again to all of you for making our Kickstarter and Film Collaborative fundraising effort so successful! Since the main campaign ended, our team of sweaty young interns have been hard at work in my garage compiling all of your data and working on getting the rewards out!
Our team has spent the last couple of weeks updating our IMDb page with thank yous, ordering mugs/tshirts/totes, emailing PDFs, putting our thank you’s on the website, mailing buttons and setting up consultation meetings. If you were supposed to be thanked on the website ($15 or more), your name should already be up here! So, if there are any spelling issues or you can’t find your name, by all means let me know. And if you were supposed to be on IMDb ($40 or more), your name should already be up there, too! Of course, since the film hasn’t been shot yet, you’ll only be able to check it if you have IMDbPro.
As effective as the crowd-funding campaign has been, we still need to raise over 90% of our budget!So if you still want to increase your level of support or tell your heiress friends or rich uncle Harry to join you on this adventure, you can head on over to the Film Collaborative Website to donate tax-deductibly to Bernard and Huey, or better yet, email me directly about investing, donating or other contribution via dmirvish@slamdance.com and/or download the business plan here!
Meanwhile, the good news on the coveted MirvishScopes is that after all the Kickstarter surveys have been tallied, it looks like we’re going to be making and shipping 90 of these fun little lens systems!! The bad news? We have to make and ship 90 of them! From my little prototype that many of you saw in the video during the mid-campaign, it’s been an exciting challenge to figure out how to mass produce them.
We’ve visited a Chinese-based optical company with a local office across the street from the Chino State Prison. We saw an 80+ year old optical engineer on our trip to ComicCon, who told us all about flying Navy fighters for Chiang Kai-shek, designing underwater lenses to look for the remains of the Challenger Space Shuttle, working for Walt Disney and doing top secret work for the Defense Department. And we’ve got ersatz Canon body caps flying in from Hong Kong via Franfurt. We’ve already done a lot of the labor intensive part of the operation: drilling, grinding, melting, fuming and huffing, and I am happy to report no injuries or hallucinations thus far! We’re now just waiting for the last batch of materials to come in the mail. Then, we’ll start assembling them, and sending the Scopes off into the world for you to enjoy!
Meanwhile, I had a wonderful time getting to talk at my ComicCon panel. It was an honor to speak at a panel focused on crowdfunding after such a successful campaign and I saw a few of our Kickstarter backers there! Also, I got a chance to meet head New York Times film critic A.O. Scott while hanging out at the Bill Plympton booth – turns out he’s a big Feiffer fan. Never hurts to start hobnobbing with the critics early!
On the business end, we’ve filed the LLC with the State of California, and our lawyer Bob is just finishing up the subscription agreements for our investors. We’ve pretty much honed in on our casting director, too. She’ll be out of the country in August, so I think by the beginning of September we’ll hit the ground running with money in the bank and a start date on the horizon! I’ll also be meeting up with Jules in the Bay Area in just a few weeks – hopefully I can get him on camera again.
Thank you so much again for all your support!!
-Dan
