Call it a Mutual Fund or Crowd Funding or whatever. But collecting 85 lakhs for a movie just via Facebook and Twitter is no mean task. This video tells the tale of director Onir (@onir_anticlock on Twitter) (of My Brother Nikhil fame) … who used Facebook and Twitter to ask for funding from common users, after they faced difficulty in getting on board producers. The movie in reference is I Am which is a collection of 4 short stories on homosexuality, Kashmirir pundits, single motherhood and child abuse.

And no, it is NOT some low budget B grade college freshmen movie. It has stalwarts like Anurag Basu, Anurag Kashyap, Juhi Chawla, Sanjay Suri, Manisha Koirala and Nandita Das!

Onir basically started sending out updates to his online community (fans and followers) about this one time opportunity to be a part of the film. Users can pay either 1000 Rs. to see their name in credits or 1,00,000+ Rs. to become a co-producer, where your get a share of the profit! As of now ‘I am’ has got about 65-70 owners and almost 350 co-owners raising 85 lakhs. Onir goes on to say how they spent 2-3 hours per day on social networking websites and engaging with users (now contributors and effective stakeholders) on what’s happening with the movie. Here’s why such a move is good for the entire ecosystem around a movie:

  • The ownership and hence the risks gets distributed amongst many.
  • The audience is a part of the product from the beginning and is hence more suspectible to spreading the word in its their own social circles and influencing peers to be a part of product in coming days.
  • Perfect way to generate some pre-launch buzz, without any monetary costs.

Tips for Mr. Onir:

Give users multiple options to send some online itself. Paypal on website. And e-commerce app on Facebook. There would be many drop outs if you ask people to read online and pay offline.

Update:

There is one more example that can be put here which I read in HT Cafe today (and it involves the gorgeous Chitrangda Singh, so I had to put it here)

Sudhir Mishra used Facebook Polls to ask users to come up with a name for his next movie! He uploaded a clip of the movie and gave its users to chose from two options. He has now finalised on Yeh Sali Zindagi