If there’s one thing more ubiquitous than lame Kickstarter campaigns, it’s lame trailers for lame Kickstarter campaigns. Seriously, would it kill folks who are asking the Internet for money to jazz up their pitches a bit? This is especially true for filmmakers looking to fund their projects via the crowdsourcing tool: Why should anyone kick in a few bucks if your trailer is just you talking to the camera while sitting in front of a computer running a jacked copy of Adobe Premiere?
Enter Milwaukee filmmaker Jon Phillips, who has whipped up a quietly demented trailer for his in-the-works horror short Needlepoint. Not that the pitch looks like much at first: Standing on a porch before slowly walking through an apartment, the UW-Milwaukee film grad explains Needlepoint’s particular genre (“A psychological/thriller/horror family thing,”) introduces producers Jessica Farrell and Kristin Peterson (Peterson is represented by a puppy stand-in), and gets into a little bit of the story (“A young woman trying to reconnect with her catatonic mother over the death of her sister.”) From there…well, go ahead and watch for yourself.
Phillips and company are looking to raise a rather modest sum—$3,000—by September 10 to cover the costs of production equipment, locations, and post-production. Per usual, there are plenty of goodies awaiting potential donors, including a digital download of the film, stickers, and other “filmmaking ephemera” ($50 or more), and a “hand-embroidered pillow, wall hanging, or towel of your choosing personalized with your name, the amount you pledged, the words ‘THE YARN DARNEDEST!’…and the personal satisfaction of being an all around yarn-darn good human being” ($1,000 or more).
If those rewards sound good, or if you simply want to see a “family-based psychological horror short film about love and hate and everything in between” where characters are “forced into performing unspeakable acts in the name of love,” check out Needlepoint’s Kickstarter page here.
[h/t Kurt Raether]