Project Funding

Understanding project funding applications and sponsorship is vital in the professional environment I intend to enter into, as often I will need to find way of funding ideas an projects in order to bring them to life. With this project I had initially intended on spending as little of a budget as possible, but as it progressed it because clear how spending nothing would be an impossibility so I began looking into ways of funding the project. One option I looked into was sponsorship from organisations or companies to help me obtain materials and venues I would need. However after looking into this it was clear that the project was not at a developed enough stage for substantial sponsorship, and that it would have to be exhibited first in at least a proof of concept form to successfully visually demonstrate the piece in action.

I then moved on to an alternative fundraising concept; project funding websites. These work through people pledging towards your proposed project and upon reaching your target in your time frame you acquire the money. I researched a few and came across one based in Bristol called Sponsorcraft, specifically aimed at funding student projects. Once I had decided that this was the project-funding site I would be using I began looking into making a page. The page had to include a description of the project, a biography of the artist (me), pledge tiers with rewards and it was advised that I also create a video for the page to portray the project clearly and visually to audiences in order to raise my target. I began by writing the bio (which can be found by following the link to the page) and then followed that by writing up my pledge tiers with incentive rewards, gradually getting better as the donations rose:

However, these aspects were not the most extensive parts of this fundraising, as making a video was massively important to represent the project to audiences. I spoke to Rupert about helping me shoot this video and we decided that we should try and reference the visual aspect of the project by projecting images on to a wall next to me (making the video much more interesting to watch) as I talk to camera describing the project and the necessity for funding. So I created a set of projections to tie in with what I would be saying, we projected them next to me, lit the ‘set’ (something I had not done prior, educating me about set lighting) and I read off a cue next to the camera which I had written which described all the necessary information about the project:

Once we had filmed this video, I edited it together in Final Cut Pro, paying attention to ensure that the sound was fine, the colour grading and editing was both aesthetically pleasing and continual throughout, and that the video made sense to somebody unfamiliar with the project, hopefully encouraging them to pledge towards it. This is a screengrab of the editing timeline in FCP:

This is the final Vimeo video:

And this is the link to the final Sponsorcraft page:

https://sponsorcraft.com/p/incarcerated/

Creating this page was great professional practice as this may be something I will have to do in future for other projects. Managing and sharing it is and will be a continual thing until late May if I am to reach my goal, but if I do it will be massively beneficial to the project overall.