Kickstopper

Charlie Kaufman and Dan Harmon break Kickstarter record

On Sunday, Anomalisa became the most funded Kickstarter film ever.

The stop-motion animated movie—a collaboration between writer/director Charlie Kaufman and Community’s Dan Harmon and Dino Stamatopoulous that kicked off in July—raised $406,237 thanks to its 5,770 supporters.

Anomalisa barely surpassed The Gamers: Hands of Fate, the third installment in the role-playing-game-centric film series, which successfully raised $405,917.

Only 25 percent of Kickstarter projects deliver on time

Kickstarter success doesn't depend on whether or not the project gets funded. It depends on whether or not the product gets delivered.

Famous for sudden and sometimes astonishing acts of charity, Reddit is about to supercharge its crowdfunding powers, thanks to a special deal with Crowdtilt.

The agreement, in the works for months, will make the spunky startup Reddit’s official fundraising partner. The goal is to make donations simple, fast, and safe, Erik Martin, Reddit’s general manager, told the Daily Dot.

Penny Arcade's new business model: Kickstarter

Since the early 2000’s, people have taken for granted that if they want to look at something on the Internet, it’s going to have ads plastered all over it.

Thirteen-year-old webcomic Penny Arcade wants to break this mold.

On Tuesday the comic’s writer and artist launched a Kickstarter which, if successful, will fund the site ad-free for a year. The pair are hoping to raise $1,000,000 from donors.

“What I'm saying is that we want to sell out, and we would love to sell out to you,” they wrote.

Artist Mike “Gabe” Krahulik announced on the Penny Arcade blog that the idea had come from a period in 2001 when they began running the comic entirely thanks to reader donations.

“You paid for our rent, food, video games and in return we made PA three times a week as well as a bunch of extra content. A lot has changed in eleven years. PA has fourteen employees now, we put on two massive conventions every year, we run a worldwide charity, we produce our own video games and web show. It’s a major operation now and running it off of donations again seems impossible. Or is it?”

It’s possible, but Krahulik said it’ll cost far more than it used to. The Kickstarter’s first monetary goal is $250,000, which will remove the main advertisement—the leaderboard—from the top of the website for a year. From there, twelve more goals follow, climaxing at $1,400,000.

To many readers, however, Penny Arcade is asking too much. Several referenced a 2011 comic, where Penny Arcade derided Kickstarter users for using the site for personal gain.

“Penny Arcade: May 2011: using Kickstarter for personal gains is awful... July 2012: uses Kickstarter for personal gains,” @kurafire tweeted.

“2012 biggest ‘not sure if serious’ moment: Penny Arcade Kickstarter,” @drjft wrote.

Open up the floodgates. Kickstarter is headed to Great Britain.

The über-popular crowdfunding platform announced today that residents of the United Kingdom will be able to use the site to launch projects beginning this autumn.

When does art function as something more than just art? When does it inspire and uplift even the most beleaguered community so that it does not just hope for change, but instead finds a way to embody the change it hopes to make?

The three men behind Oakland arts collective Wonderment Consortium hope to answer those questions. Together, they've set out to provide the children of Oakland with a figurehead they can admire and model themselves upon, a personality whose presence looms so large it can only be captured in art: Tom Hanks.

In the weeks ahead, the Wonderment Consortium will turn to Kickstarter to raise the funds necessary to build a statue honoring the Academy Award-winning actor.

"Tom Hanks is the spirit of these children," Consortium member Steuart Pittman told the Daily Dot.

"He's had the arc that a lot of comedians have had where he's gone from goofing off and being a comedian to taking on more and more serious roles. There's a depth to Tom Hanks, and he's able to inspire and bring weight to even the lightest of his roles. The gravitas that he shows in Joe Versus the Volvano when he's standing on the precipice of the lava pit… it's heartwrenching. When you go to these school rallies and gatherings, what we hear is that these children want to be just like Tom Hanks."

With colleagues Packard Jennings and Scott Vermeire, Pittman want to erect a nine-foot papier-mâché statue of Hanks in front of an Oakland-area high school to be named at a later date. It's a gift the three activists wish to bestow unto the city's community, and the price won't come cheap: The Wonderment Consortium is asking for $10,000.

"The costs in the Bay Area for projects like this can be astronomical," Vermeire explained to the Daily Dot. "We've got warehousing… it's quite a bit of newspaper. There are all sorts of adhesives that come into play."

"There will be some wood armature that we don't even list specifically on the site," his partner Jennings continued.

"Constructing iconic papier-mâché statues is not so simple that you can commit to a list of materials and themes. As artists, there is so much that is left unknown. We're trying to build an inspirational sculpture, but it's not really about reaching our destination. Right now, we're trying to focus our efforts on the journey itself."

There's no telling what an actual papier-mâché statue of Tom Hanks will cost a team of artists—to the Daily Dot's knowledge, no man has ever set out to erect such a tribute—but one could assume from a smattering of kindergarten art classes that papier-mâché is a decently inexpensive resource, and that the Wonderment Consortium in turn have tried to dupe the city of Oakland.

Since Kickstarter’s terms of service clearly states that the company "is not liable for any damages or loss incurred related to rewards or any other use of the service," the crowdfunding platform is ripe for potential scammers with a solid pitch or quirky gimmick.

Indeed, the sentiment running through the press is that Vermeire, Pittman, and Jennings are cashing in on a $200 job, that they're devaluing the importance of community landmarks, and that they've created this project in jest: The Inspirational Tom Hanks Statue Kickstarter campaign is a joke campaign unto itself.

The three men making up the Wonderment Consortium say that public opinion could not be more wrong.

"One of the aspects of the project that's been surprising to us is that we've gone about proposing a project that's lighthearted in concept," Vermeire said.

"Tom Hanks is such an uplifting and inspirational figure, and oftentimes he plays a humorous and lighthearted character. Because of that, I think that a lot of people have gotten the impression that the project is also lighthearted. That's fine. I look at so many other Kickstarter projects and see projects of greater value to society, much like ours. Right now, we're trying to focus on getting people's money and making this campaign successful."

They've got 17 days and $8,280 to go. That's a hefty sum, but it’s a small price to pay on the issue of inspiring children.

Kickstopper: Inspirational Tom Hanks Statue

Kickstopper: A Motown tribute to Nickelback

Scott Bradlee is hardly what anyone would call a Nickelback fan.

"All I remember doing is changing the radio station every time I'd hear a Nickelback song come on," Bradlee, a jazz musician in New York, told the Daily Dot. "I had no opinion. I didn't even think of Nickelback."

But then came November, when Nickelback, one of the most indescribably lame bands on the planet, was picked to play the halftime show of the Thanksgiving Day gridiron bash between the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers.

Stranger still, the game was being played in Detroit—Hitsville U.S.A.—the land of Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and the rest of the Motown legends.

This was not right, the people of Detroit valiantly declared. They even launched a petition, "The Detroit Lions: Replace Nickelback as the halftime show for the Thanksgiving Game," which gathered over 55,000 votes. But nothing changed; the Lions brass backed Nickelback.

Reading about the spout from his home in New York City's Astoria neighborhood, Bradlee hatched the plan to blend the two sides together. Bradlee would merge the sounds of Nickelback and Motown together. He sat down and transcribed the band's multiplatinum single "How You Remind Me" into a Motown song, repurposing the melody from guitar to piano and adding a horn section to convert on the crossover.

Bradlee posted the video to YouTube just before Nickelback took the Ford Field stage on Thanksgiving Day. Titled "A Motown Tribute to Nickelback," the video went viral, racking up over 120,000 views. It now sits at 230,000 views and has helped earn Bradlee and his buddies a trip out to British Columbia in August, where A Motown Tribute to Nickelback will perform alongside artists like Charles Bradley, Chromeo, and the Tragically Hip at Virgin Mobile's Live at Squamish music festival. Bradlee agreed—despite the fact that the tribute had only had one song.

"Now the question becomes, what happens if we decide to become a real band?" Bradlee explained to the Daily Dot. It appears we're likely to find out.

Bradlee and his bandmates are committed to developing a full set of Motown variations on Nickelback for their Squamish show, but the group wants to make it more than just a one-shot deal. They actually want to cut a full-length album of repurposed Nickelback tracks, one for every track in the band's seven-album catalog.

"Some songs do lend themselves to Motown a little bit better than others, but we haven't found a song that's stumped us yet. There's such a rich history of Motown going through the early 1960s and through the Soul Train era, we can always find something that'll work."

Recently, the group launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise the $3,000 necessary to pay for studio time and song licensing fees. With 12 days left, Bradlee and his cohorts are still $1,500 short, but that's done little to delay the effort. As Bradlee notes in the project's video, the crew's already handled two of the most important parts of becoming a band, "taking pretentious band photos" and setting up a Facebook page.

"Nickelback is about all I've been listening to. We've been digging on 'Lullaby,' their new song. And we're really excited about 'Rock Star.' My dream is that any time Nickelback records a song, A Motown Tribute to Nickelback will record that same song."

Chad Kroeger and the boys in Nickelback are on tour through the summer but should start work on their eighth album shortly after touching down in Canada this fall. Sounds like Scott Bradlee better get ready.

Kickstopper: A Motown Tribute to Nickelback

Kickstopper: "Lunar Aid 1985," a $21 million space folk album recorded on the moon

Could Muddy Waters have played the blues so well if he'd never been through Mississippi? Could Bob Dylan have written so poignantly about 4th Street if he’d never set foot in Greenwich Village?

The answer to those questions is a definitive "no," a truth that poses an interesting dilemma for Jim MacKenzie and Sarah Giavedoni, the wildly inventive duo behind comedic blog Stuff Monsters Like.

That's because the tandem wants to record the first-ever space folk album, a collection of songs that's indigenous to the interstellar universe and all the planets, stars, and objects therein.

But in order to do this, MacKenzie and Giavedoni have to go to the moon. The two say it's absolutely necessary in order to make Lunar Aid 1985 the truest representation of space's native sound.

"We still don't know what space folk music actually is," MacKenzie told the Daily Dot from his home in Asheville, N.C.

"But we do know that we want to be the Bob Dylans of space. We just haven't made it there yet."

MacKenzie insists that the duo is "dead serious about this," though the cost of sending two citizens to the moon to record an album of folk music is certainly more than what two can make on a blog's payroll.

MacKenzie and Giavedoni ultimately decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign, Space Folk Album: Lunar Aid 1985. The total funding that they set out to raise: $21,474,836—the greatest sum that a project creator is allowed to raise on the crowdfunding platform.

"We tried to raise $578 billion, but they wouldn't let us," Giavedoni said. "I put in five, seven, eight, comma, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, and it said that you cannot put in more than 'this amount.' So we put in this amount."

Now, wait. I know what you're thinking: A Kickstarter campaign to raise $21 million so that two jokers from North Carolina can launch into space, land on the moon, and then record an album of space folk music… and Kickstarter approved it? Turns out getting that approval was easier than you think.

"This is a creative project," Giovedoni explained. “Our goal is to get to the moon so that we can properly make this album. We went through the rules very carefully and that met all of their guidelines. We had to adjust our goal, but once we did, Kickstarter sent us an email that said, 'Good luck to you.'"

OK, so it's on. And with eight days left in the campaign, MacKenzie and Giovedoni are sitting pretty. With $4,533 raised, the two are just $21,470,303 away from reaching their funding goal and blasting. We're thinking they have a chance, if only some great visionary would lend a helping hand.

"We're trying to get this in front of Richard Branson," MacKenzie said. "We think he'd love it.

“The thing about Richard Branson is that he could write a check for $21 million this afternoon and not even miss it. He'd miss dinner. I would be happy to take $21 million from Richard Branson—Sir Richard Branson.”

Richard Branson, if you're out there, quit grooming your perfectly flowing coif for a minute and help these people out! They need $21 million.

Kickstopper: Space Folk Album: Lunar Aid 1985

Retired soldier turns to Kickstarter to tell an untold war story

Sgt. Konrad Ludwig left his home when he was 17 years old so that he could serve in the military.

It was what he thought was right, he said. He wanted to stand up for what he believed in. By the time he was 19, he had earned his place as the gun team leader in an urban assault Stryker unit known as Bull Company.

Bull Company had one mission when it deployed to Afghanistan in Aug. 2007: to run a series of kill-or-capture raids in a district of Baghdad known as Sadr City that eventually resulted in the hunting down of a number of high-value targets in the Mahdi Army. The team was given 15 months.

On March 23, in the middle of the 15-month mission, one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the war broke out in the middle of Sadr City. The Madhi Army rose up to overthrow the occupation, and Bull Company's rules of engagement were lifted.

"Open street fighting lasted for nearly three months," Ludwig wrote in an Reddit IAmA on Friday. "Thousands of people were killed and wounded," including more than 200 American soldiers and countless Afghani civilians.

But news of the Sadr City uprising never made its way back home to the United States. Instead, Ludwig saw the papers around the country run headlines on American Idol, Twilight, and Elliot Spitzer getting caught with a prostitute.

Today, Ludwig owns a private publishing company, and he's written a book about Sadr City in hopes that his story will soon be heard. Called Stryker: The Siege of Sadr City, the tome is a first-hand account of what happened in those streets during the final battle for Baghdad.

"It began as a confession, a letter to old friends, and an attempt to confront the things that I had experienced," he wrote.

"My initial goal was to shed some light on what happened, the things I had to do, and why I'll never be the same. As the project unfolded, however, it turned out that there was much more at stake than my own well-being."

Manuscript in hand, Ludwig turned to Kickstarter to help turn the book from paper to product. He set his funding goal at $15,000, a figure that he considered enough to help him publish and distribute the book, organize a publicity campaign, and embark on a national tour.

Ludwig met his goal in the campaign's first day.

With three days left in funding, Ludwig's already managed to raise more than $30,000. Today's been his biggest day yet, thanks in part to his sprawling Reddit IAmA, which has brought in over 2,500 comments.

Sharon Lee Lomurno came upon her love for bigfoot much in the same that many of her peer field reporters did. It wasn't from a giant silhouette seen along some dark and dusty trail. It was from a movie, Charles Pierce's 1972 classic, The Legend of Boggy Creek. "I'd always have this recurring dream," Lomurno told the Daily Dot from her home in Cleveland. "I'd be trying to call the police, and that rotary phone dial would keep spinning and spinning and I could never get through to 911." She'd have that dream throughout her childhood, but the nightmare soon turned to fascination. By the time she was married, Lomurno no longer wanted to run from a bigfoot. She wanted to find one. She started frequenting the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, a website created for those who have dedicated their time to finding the giant, ape-like cryptids. She found the sightings database and checked for updates regularly. She found one report of a bigfoot sighting only 15 minutes from here house. That's when she decided to get out into the field. Strapped with her a brand new camera and her husband by her side, Lomurno hit the woods to see what she could find. She searched for hours, she said, and found nothing. That all changed on the walk back to the trail with her husband. "He stopped and said, 'Look at this,'" she said. "It was this huge footprint in the gravel. It was perfect. You could see the imprint and everything. It was the left footprint, and we wanted to find the right. "I've read that a Big Foot step is about four-and-a-half to five feet, so we looked around there. Sure enough, we found a right foot print with a fresh baby green maple leaf pressed underneath the print. I went back to the first foot print and bent down to take a picture and we heard this huge ‘Boom’ sound and noticed that this tree was shaking violently. My husband thought it was the wind, but it was just one tree. I took a picture and said, 'Let's just get out of here.'" The two split, but Lomurno was hooked. She contacted the mid-America Bigfoot Research Group and told them her story. Then she created The Bigfoot Field Reporter, a site she's run since 2009 to update readers on the current events in bigfoot research around the United States. Now that she's amassed a consistent readership and nearly 700 fans on her Facebook page, Lomurno wants to take her research on the road. Specifically, she wants to tour the country doing field work with fellow bigfoot enthusiasts. Last week she set up a Kickstarter campaign in an effort to raise the $5,000 necessary to make the trip happen. Lomurno hopes to produce a documentary of her trip when she's completed the 6,900 miles on the road. She said she wants to highlight the real research that's done on bigfoot—not the Hollywood portrayal. "It's not down with 30 cameramen running into the woods with flashlights and staying there for three days and leaving," she said. "You have to establish your ground. You can't go willy nilly into areas saying 'I'm going to find a bigfoot today.' "When I do my research, I go out for the day and go hiking. I look for signs that a Big Foot's in the area: strange rock formations, strange tree formations, fresh roadkill. If there's a bunch of missing vegetation in one area. You can tell when something large has been through the area. That night, you do your night surveillance. You can't get into your tent and go to sleep at 11pm." Is she expecting her trip to get funded? Lomurno can only hope. Unfortunately for her, the bigfoot research industry's not one that's flush with money. A week into her campaign, Lomurno's only been able to raise $420. "The people in this field are usually unemployed or dirt poor," she said. "I need a big investor." What she really needs is a bigfoot. But we all know those don't come so easily.

Orlando-based guitarist David DiSanto is into the epic stuff—transcendent song hooks, lyrics about medieval battles. He's always looking for the most valiant sound.

"Go big or go home songwriting," DiSanto told the Daily Dot, the type that takes its cues from "the beliefs of generations past as well as the hopes and aspirations for the future of existence."

Naturally, DiSanto finds his muse in modern folklore—more specifically, comic books. He's been a reader of them since he was a child.

Thor was his favorite, and he followed the great Norse warrior through each of his epic journeys with his legendary Avengers crew. He idolized the long-haired hero, but he didn't notice his likeness until he attended a screening of Thor's 2011 blockbuster smash:

"I'm pretty much a spitting image of Chris Hemsworth. And that's pretty cool.I decided that I should go as Thor for Halloween. I ended up making this whole outfit."

DiSanto went to the midnight premiere of this spring's The Avengers in costume, too: painted Under Armor gear, red cape, and beat-up football pads. He left the theater with his jaw on the floor.

"Top 5 movies easily," he said after the screening. "It was totally awesome."

So awesome, in fact, that DiSanto now wants to write an album about the movie and run a mini-tour in which all his bandmates dress up in character. That means American flag leotards, mega-huge Hulk suits, and hopefully a drummer who can look like Scarlett Johansson.

"Playing in a full Thor costume? You can't get any more epic than that," DiSanto said.

DiSanto turned to Kickstarter to put up his pitch: "Hard Rock Album about the Avengers." He's hoping to raise $7,000 by July 2, money that will go towards studio space, costumes, and a little money to offshoot the time DiSanto spends working on the album.

The biggest challenge, he said, will be coming up with a storyline as epic as the adventures the Avengers manage to find themselves in every day.

"I'm not quite sure right now," he said. "I'm definitely in the brainstorm stage. I can adhere strictly to the movie in an epic storytelling sense, or I can run a bunch of double entendres and make up a story that isn't told in the comics."

DiSanto hasn't been able to raise a dollar since launching the campaign last week, and considering his fair-to-middlin' write-up (a single paragraph that only offers that the album will be "VERY EPIC") and unproven songbook, it's going to be tough to find the funding necessary to turn this idea into an album.

Songwriter and artist Amanda Palmer has raised $820,000 for a Kickstarter project that she set out to fund for $100,000. Hers is the most funded musical project in the crowdfunding site's history by a margin of more than $600,000. It is an all-encompassing endeavor that will allow the dynamic Boston musician to package and promote an album, commission more than 30 artists to produce its artwork, take her new band on tour, open an art gallery, and generally bring joy to her many adoring fans throughout the world. The project brought in over $250,000 on its first day and has received backing from more than 17,000 people—with no signs of slowing down. With eight days left in the campaign, Palmer's campaign stands a solid chance at becoming the first musical project to reach the million dollar mark. She's inspired many who thought that Kickstarter was only a place for musicians to fund debut albums that local labels don't want. But she's also managed to raise $720,000 more than she'd originally set out to raise. What's she going to do with all that money? Palmer took to her Kickstarter updates page yesterday, writing a long update detailing what she's spent and where her money's set to go. "lots of people have been asking LOTS OF QUESTIONS. why we set the goal where we did, and who the fuck do i think i am doing this anyway," she wrote. "BUT this question from @MaleahArvieux on twitter merits its own big-ass answer: 'so, are you loaded?'" The long answer: "depends on your definition of 'loaded.'" The short: hardly.