Kickstarter Tops $100 Million in Documentary Financing

This month, the total amount pledged to documentary films through Kickstarter reached $100 million.

“It’s really become something of a norm for documentary filmmakers to use Kickstarter at some point in their process,” Dan Schoenbrun of Kickstarter told the Hollywood Reporter.

Over 4,500 campaigns for films have been held on the crowd-funding site in the six years since its inception. Some of the documentaries funded include the Oscar-winning short film Inocente and eight films that were nominated for the award.

“The documentary community has come to Kickstarter from the very beginning,” he added. 2012 was the biggest year in documentary crowd-funding on the site with over $25 million pledged and over a thousand films funded.

Schoenbrun explained that documentary films are rarely completely financed by a Kickstarter campaign. Usually, it is only to raise a part of the budget. “I think it really speaks to the documentary process, which I think for so many films can be years if not decades long. Putting together a film and following your subjects can really stretch on,” he stated. “Documentary filmmakers, more often than narrative, find themselves needing to sort of replenish and sustain themselves over a number of years.”

Kickstarter campaigns also help establish a big, dedicated fan base for the films. For the Oscar nominated film Finding Vivian Maier, filmmakers John Maloof and Charlie Siskel used Kickstarter to raise most of the budget, but paid the remaining amount themselves. “I don’t know that we would’ve put in our own money to the extent that we did had we not gotten that initial substantial funding,” Siskel said. “Not only did the money allow us to actually shoot, but it created a strong fan base for the film…It allowed us to be independent, to not have secured funding from some single source or single benefactor.”