December 2009
16 posts
1 tag
Creator Q&A: Recreating Kate Bush
(NOTE: We’ll be returning Monday with the finale of the Kickstarter Awards)
When San Francisco-based musician Aria Jalali’s not on tour with his band Railcairs, he keeps busy by deconstructing and rerecording famous songs in his own synth-crackle-pop sort of style. Just listen to his cover of The Cranberries “Dreams” for proof. He plans to up the ante for his...
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Reward Season
Happy holidays! All of us at Kickstarter would like to wish you a happy new year and a great holiday with your family, friends, and loved ones. We’re going to keep things pretty quiet until January, but first we wanted to share a few recent rewards we’ve received. (This is the season for giving and receiving, after all.)
Sam Winston — A Dictionary Story
Sam’s project...
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Creator Q&A: Acid Marshmallow
Matt Kimmel has archived hundreds of live shows from up and coming indie bands for his live video website Acid Marshmallow. His rapidly growing archive includes sets from indie darlings Girls, Blank Dogs, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Real Estate (above), Vivian Girls, and more — a collection that doubles as a comprehensive reference of underground music over the last few years....
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Creator Q&A: The Hike
Director Randy Nargi has had some experience with unusual subject matter — his award-winning mockumentary G-Sale is about people obsessed with garage sales — but nothing quite so strange as what the teenage couple in his new paranormal thriller The Hike encounter while trapped in a remote stone cabin in the mountains. (Cue appropriately eerie music.) The Hike is a prequel to a...
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Creator Q&A: Kids Go Free to Fun Fun Time
Ben Hicks is a young filmmaker currently living in Japan, where he’s been at work on his film Kids Go Free to Fun Fun Time. His previous short, an exceptionally well-made montage of a young hipster couple, earned him plaudits and attention. He hopes Kids Go Free can be a worthy follow-up.
Ben’s been keeping backers in the loop with updates (like this one where he’s wasted) and...
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Hello!
Hi! My name is Fred Benenson and I wanted to introduce myself to everyone as I’ve just recently joined the team to work on outreach, community development, and all the fun stuff in between.
To give you some background, I’ve been working in the copyright reform space for a while, and just a couple of weeks ago left my gig at Creative Commons to come on board with Kickstarter.
In my...
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Mysterious Letters' Mysterious Package
Yesterday I received stuffed-full envelope from Lenka and Michael of Mysterious Letters, the project that sent a personal letter to every person in a small Irish village earlier this year and 600+ letters to a neighborhood in Pittsburgh last month. Here’s what I found inside.
Here’s what the text says:
We thought you might like an update. I will attribute each quote to an...
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The Importance of Video
Kickstarter projects aren’t required to have videos, but we highly recommend it. Video is the best way to communicate the emotions, motivations, and character of a project, and the sincerity and seriousness of the creator. It’s also more fun. Whenever I click on a project only to see there’s no video, I’m immediately disappointed. The project feels less complete, and...
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The NY Times Year in Ideas
This past weekend, Kickstarter had the tremendous honor of being included in the New York Times Magazine’s annual Year in Ideas. The article mentioned three specific Kickstarter projects: Allison Weiss makes a record, Emily Richmond sails around the world, and Scott Thomas’ Designing Obama. All three do a fantastic job of exemplifying Kickstarter’s potential — if...
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The Degenerate Craft Fair -- Week Two
As Yancey has mentioned, Kickstarter was recently asked to participate in the Degenerate Craft Fair — a DIY craft-gala taking place at three different locations over the course of three weekends this month. The launch party, which happened last Friday at Silent Barn in Brooklyn, was a rockin’ success. We met a lot of great people, heard a lot of cool project ideas, and listened to...
The Mysterious Letters Aftermath
And then there’s Mysterious Letters, a Kickstarter project from two artists — Michael and Lenka — to mail everyone in the world a personal letter. It began in April with a small village named Cushendall in Northern Ireland, where the letters caused quite a stir (their project video is the BBC news broadcast about it). Then came their successfully funded Kickstarter project and...
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Animal Collective to Africa
Joshua Dibb is a member of Animal Collective, arguably the biggest band in all of indie rock and one of the biggest bands in the world. Last month Deacon (Josh’s performing name) was invited to perform at the Festival in the Desert, a wild gathering in Mali in the Northern Sahara. With its extremely rugged setting (literally in the middle of the world’s largest, non-polar desert),...
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Why I Pledge: Eliot Sykes
A couple of days ago, we got a customer service email from someone curious about how their money as a backer flowed to project creators. During the course of our exchange, the customer, named Eliot Sykes (above), casually mentioned that he has started a ritual wherein everyday he picks a different Kickstarter project to which he pledges $1.
Obviously we were struck by this idea. We spend so...
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Craft Fair Signage
As we mentioned last week, during the month of December Kickstarter and a host of our awesome creators will be participating in the Degenerate Craft Fair in NYC. The New York-based members of the Kickstarter team will be on hand, as will the creators. Expect a full schedule of who/what/when/where next week.
Anyway, we didn’t have any kind of signage or anything for the event, so our...
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Creator Q&A: In Transit
Some might call Jonathan Dueck’s work unusual — he draws, paints, and scratches on old 16mm movies, then projects them with accompaniment from unique, specially curated musical pieces — but we think of it as artistically clever recycling. Over the last four years Jonathan has completed over 20 of his handmade films, and his sonic collaborators have ranged the gambit from...
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Creator Q&A: Kill Screen
Journalist Jamin Brophy-Warren is the man behind Kill Screen, a new gaming publication recently funded on Kickstarter. Kill Screen aims to be more Paris Review than Game Pro by approaching video game writing as more than just a buyer’s guide. Jamin and his partners see gaming for what it is: a cultural phenomenon that’s genuinely unmatched in the entertainment space, where games can...