YWO | Parry Shen's Blog

YES, WE’RE OPEN’s Kickstarter has officially launched!

What’s KickStarter you may ask? Bascially, it’s a funding framework to help ‘kickstart’ creative projects.

The Way It Works: A project must reach its funding needs within a set time frame or NO money (prior pledges before the deadline) exchanges hands. This way — creators don’t develop a project with an insufficient budget and donors don’t contribute to a project that is unlikely to come to fruition without a full budget .

In YWO‘s case, the production’s fiscal goals of $10,000 need to be reached by Oct 3 in order to be successfully funded.

The funds will go towards all our post-production needs (editing, music, sound mix, color correction, etc) to ready a cut for our submission into the 2012 film festivals (ie: Sundance, Tribeca, South by SouthWest, etc.) — where all the film distributors congregate annually to acquire ready-made films for a relative bargain (bargain for them but big for the producers).

Way back in the day, before all this FaceBook and Kickstarter ballyhoo — “Better Luck Tomorrow” received major help from multiple sources to ready a cut suitable for our submission into the Sundance Film Festival – which ultimately led to the film being discovered and distributed by MTV Films/Paramount.

From director Justin Lin’s acquaintance with MC Hammer providing us funds at the 11th hour to continue production… to the sound engineers of an Academy Award ® nominated movie sneaking “BLT” onto their sound stages during their 2-week vacation and doing our entire sound mix for free (literally saving us tens of thousands of dollars).

Originally, I re-dubbed approximately 85% of my dialogue for “BLT” (which never really matches up perfectly in the end) due to audio problems when we originally recorded.

However, with the assistance from these Oscar-winning sound engineers, they were able to recover all the original tracks, except for one scene (Daric visting Ben at his corn-dog job).