What to do with UNsuccessful auditions to a free project?

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 14:36:18 +0000

What are my ethical responsibilities with unsuccessful audition recordings to a free-culture production like Lunatics? Ought I to destroy them? Save them for later, but NOT include them in the project sources? Or just put them in there for all to find?

Successful audition recordings have been used in the project already. But I'm uncertain what factors to consider with respect to the unsuccessful ones.

Potential issues here:

Actor reputations
Trust-relationship with actors (What's their typical expectation with audition recordings? Will this inhibit future casting calls?)
Personality rights -- do I even have the right to say who auditioned (thus associated the name with my project, even if we didn't select them)?
Integrity of the project as "open source"
Educational/insight value of understanding the directing and casting process
A pool of talent for future parts

Some of the auditions were extremely good. Some missed simply because the competition was stiff. Some because they just weren't in the right vocal range. Some because they didn't seem to understand the part. Others were just very bad actors who need to go back and get acting lessons -- or like me, they're amateurs who aren't really actors at all, but just want to be involved in the project.

I want to do the right thing here, not just "stay within the law". I'm willing to consider ethical, legal, and pragmatic considerations. I feel conflicted about what's "right", though, and I'd like to hear some opinions from others.

How to set up your own kickstarter site

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 13:43:52 +0000

We set up own kickstarter site for crowdfunding concerts. We wrote an article on our blog explaining how we did it.

Here's a copy of that article.

Kickstarter is great but if you’re not a US resident, you can’t use it to kickstart your creative projects. They’ll take money from anyone, anywhere in the world, but if you’re not an American, you can’t be part of their club. Maybe there are legal reasons for this but it still sucks!

There are alternatives like Indiegogo, RocketHub, Funded by Me and many others but one of the drawbacks is that your fans might not be that enthusiastic about registering for yet another web account to support you. On top of that, they all take a percentage (generally between 4 and 8%) of the funds you raise. And there’s also the fact that you’re sending your fans to a third party site, and that you don’t have full control over the look and feel. Last but not least, you have to submit your project to them, and they can refuse it if they don’t like the look of you!

In comes IgnitionDeck.

Early October, I talked to Christian, from Aaahh Records, about our plans for One City Per Second. He introduced me to Shawn, from Virtuous Giant, who was developing a crowdfunding plugin for WordPress. I dropped him an email and explained what we planning.

They were using their own software to fund their project. For $39.99 (instead of $49.99) you were given access to the software before everyone else and lifetime updates, etc…

Here’s a short overview of the features listed on their site that were important to us.

1) Simple Paypal integration.

2) Social sharing (twitter/facebook) - it’s really easy to add those Like/Tweet buttons!

3) Mailing list support - it supports MailChimp and Aweber so you can import emails directly to a list of your choice. We use MailChimp so that was really cool. If you don’t use MailChimp, well, you should because it’s ace!

4) Unlimited Products - this was key for us because we wanted to be able to run multiple campaigns for different cities at the same time.

So we went ahead and purchased the plugin, a URL for the site, some hosting from OVH (a French hosting company), installed WordPress, and waited for the beta version of the plugin to become available.

When it was ready, Shawn installed the first version on our site, and we started working together. He provided some great advice about how to make use of the plugin and we were a great beta tester for them because we had a real life project for them to get their teeth into. Their documentation was easy to follow and it didn’t take long to configure it. There were a few bugs of course, but that’s all part of the process, and a small price to pay to be one of the first bands in the whole entire universe to have their very own crowdfunding website.

After a few weeks of real life bugs, just over a month after being introduced, we were ready to launch the site.

If you’re interested in setting up your own crowdfunding site, you won’t have to go through all of that though because the plugin is pretty much bug free now! :)

Here’s a summary of the steps.

1) Purchase the URL and hosting (or use the one you already have)

2) Install WordPress.

3) Buy the IgnitionDeck Plugin.

4) Install the IgnitionDeck Plugin.

5) Configure your site.

6) Add a campaign.

7) Raise some money for your project!

Insight Community | Step2 - Success Models - Recent discussions in Other

What to do with UNsuccessful auditions to a free project?

How to set up your own kickstarter site