Mystery symptoms.
Congratulations to photographer Thilde Jensen: Her project, Canaries, was picked by Slate as one of their 11 favorite photo exhibitions of 2012.
Canaries depicts the lives of people suffering from environmental illness, a mysterious condition that causes victims to become sickened by trace chemicals in everyday life.
Kickstarter at Sundance.
We’re back from the 2013 Sundance Film Festival with lots of exciting news to share. Kickstarter-funded films earned major awards, picked up distribution deals, and delighted packed houses, and we couldn’t be happier for these dedicated filmmakers and their backers.
It’s been an exciting year for independent film on Kickstarter, and Sundance begins the new year on a high note. We’re thrilled to see so many talented creators recognized for their hard work. Congratulations!
Featured films:
This year, 17 Kickstarter-funded films screened at the festival, including features, documentaries, and short films.
Awards:
Five films headed home with top prizes, including double laurels for Blood Brother. Hats off for this amazing achievement.
Deals:
Several films left Sundance with distribution deals in tow. Looking forward to seeing them in theaters soon!
Press:
We could fill a book with all the positive press garnered by these 17 films during Sundance. Here are just a few of the highlights.
Congrats again to all the filmmakers, their teams, and their backers. See you next year, Park City!
Holding it in your hand, it’s amazing to think that it was designed and assembled by an independent hardware startup funded by Kickstarter…
Pebble’s charming simplicity and fundamental competence inspires confidence. It’s so good at what it does now that it’s easy to imagine all other things it might do in the future.
—The Verge’s Nilay Patel reviews the Pebble watch, awarding it an 8.2!
Includes naming a goat at Poplar Wood Farm, tattooing a backer’s intitials on I Used to be Darker director Matt Porterfield, and having Ze Frank walk a mile in your shoes.
A project is born.
Here’s a crazy story about how the FlipBooKit came to life, from the creators’ most recent project update. There’s nothing better than the combination of hard work and great luck.
“A few months back, before FlipBooKit, this fellow from MAKE magazine named Matt Richardson met us at the San Mateo Maker Faire. He immediately took an interest in our mechanical flipbook art and there was enthusiastic talk of interviews, articles and kit ideas. That was June 2012.
Matt finished our interview in September, and with a little-twinkle in our eyes, we started imagining how to build a kit. ‘Why not launch a Kickstarter campaign on the publish day of the MAKE article in October?’
We came up with a name, purchased the DNS, and sat with a few guys at CRASH Space talking about box materials. After a week it all came together and our eyes were twinkling away. Then a phone call from Matt saying, “The article will publish in January, not October”.
(our plans were dashed)
Plan B
We were just about to postpone the project when Mark decided to call the folks at the NY Maker Faire. “Have a look at this art… there was gonna be an article… and we had this plan… Can we get a last-minute booth?” First we received a tentative maybe… then a YES! We were ON! We had two weeks to finish prototyping, build a booth, and create a Kickstarter campaign. Whew! You know the rest.
Now we can announce that the MAKE magazine issue is out!”
Press room.
It’s not everyday that the New York Times Magazine publishes an 11-page feature on a project.
But that’s the case with this piece on The Canyons, a Kickstarter-funded film from director Paul Schrader. Settle in for a long lunch — and maybe dessert, too.
I hadn’t anticipated that America’s new magazine for soccer fans would be quite such a testimony to the beauty of print.
—The New Yorker’s Cressida Leyshon, on Howler magazine.
A legend, restored.
The Paris Review is helping to spread the word about the restoration of Burroughs: The Movie, a Kickstarter project to preserve and re-release the first feature-length doc about the literary legend.
Support the restoration of the first feature documentary made about William S. Burroughs, unavailable for decades.
The Atlantic’s Cities blog just published a thoughtful piece on Food: An Atlas, the cartography project by Berkeley professor Darin Jensen and former student — and freelance cartographer — Molly Roy.
The duo is mapping food consumption, distribution, and production and has created over 60 maps showing off the work, such as the Farmer’s Market Accessibility Map (above), which depicts the distribution of farmers markets throughout the country.
The guerilla cartographers shared a few more maps with The Atlantic, highlighting such things as everyday eating habits of the eastern Mediterranean, and meat production and consumption in Maryland. Check them out here.
For this first time in 10 years, I’m going to be able to focus solely on my comics.
—Matt Bors, in the Washington Post, waxing on his successfully funded Kickstarter project which will allow him to print two new books. Bors was a Pulitzer Prize finalist last year.
A Man and His …Zombie? Check out some exclusive stills from the David Fincher-backed adaptation of cult-fave comic The Goon, plus a Q&A with directors TIm Miller and Jeff Fowler:
The thing that’s so great about the comic was that it really wasn’t just about zombies. It was kind of the melting pot of everything that’s kind of crazy and cool. You’ve got giant robots, you’ve got vampires, you’ve got creatures, demon priests. It’s a great sort of amalgamation of all that stuff. It’s really not just zombies.
For more not-just-zombies, check out The Goon’s project page.
Joe’s Junk Yard is a photo book that documents the life and death of a family business.
The project began long before photographer Lisa Kereszi earned an MFA from Yale and began her professional career, but it has only just reached completion. In telling the story of her family’s American Dream and subsequent struggles, Kereszi lets the powerful images of life amid ruin speak for themselves.
After successfully funding her Kickstarter project this spring, the book has been published — and just received a glowing review in the New York Times. Congrats, Lisa!
Kickstarter was transformative for us. It wasn’t just a way to raise money. It also functioned as a kind of marketing tool for a grassroots campaign. Instead of one crotchety, crabby developer calling all the shots, the client is thousands and thousands of people who care about the project. It’s much more democratic.
—James Ramsey (The Revolution Has Begun: How Kickstarter Is Changing Architecture)
Seeking a Trace
Shimpei Takada exposes contaminated soil from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to photosensitive materials for months at a time, resulting in abstract imaging of the samples’ radiation content.
He successfully funded the project on Kickstarter last year, but as this insightful Q&A reveals, he’s still hard at work.
Score one for soccer fans. The Kickstarter-funded debut issue of Howler Magazine makes a cameo in New York mag’s Approval Matrix this week — high-brow and brilliant, indeed!
If you missed the project, you can still order an issue here. And if you’re in NYC, make sure to RSVP for the release party.
