The Challenges Of Crowd Funding Porn Movies

by Coleen Singer at Sssh.com Porn For Women

When people think of porn movies, one of the things often overlooked is “who pays for making the films?”.  Traditionally, studios both large and small paid for their productions from revenue brought in by website memberships, Video on Demand and DVDs.  What has radically changed over the years is that online piracy plus the massive amount of free tube video content has severely crippled content producers’ ability to bring in the money needed to fund new films.

Read on…

What about finding investors to fund porn productions?

Prior to the disastrous “perfect storm” year of 2008 when the stock market crashed, banks failed, consumer credit card limits were crushed and porn became a free commodity on the tubes, many studios were able to find angel investors and venture capitalists that were more than happy to throw some money at porn productions.  Those days are very much over.  Investors, not just in regards to porn, but pretty much anything, are now very wary to invest in anything that is not already making a profit.

Enter Crowd Funding…

Sounds like a good idea at first, but anyone trying to do this is immediate thwarted at the moat of Kickstarter and other mainstream crowd funding companies that refuse to allow campaigns for pretty much anything outside the proper bounds of “family values”.

For example, Kickstarter’s prohibited items page clearly states:

We prohibit projects that are illegal, heavily regulated, or potentially dangerous for backers, as well as rewards that the creator did not make.

1. Any item claiming to cure, treat, or prevent an illness or condition (whether via a device, app, book, nutritional supplement, or other means).
2. Contests, coupons, gambling, and raffles.
3. Energy food and drinks.
4. Offensive material (e.g., hate speech, encouraging violence against others, etc).
5. Offering a genetically modified organism as a reward.
6. Offering alcohol as a reward.
7. Offering financial, money-processing, or credit services; financial intermediaries or cash-equivalent instruments; travel services (e.g., vacation packages); phone services (e.g., prepaid phone services, 900 numbers); and business marketing services.
8. Political fundraising.
9. Pornographic material.
10. Resale. All rewards must have been produced or designed by the project or one of its creators — no reselling things from elsewhere.
11. Drugs, nicotine, tobacco, vaporizers and related paraphernalia.
12. Weapons, replicas of weapons, and weapon accessories.

Whoa. Okay, I can see the rationale for most of these, but vaporizers, energy drinks and pornographic content – all perfectly legal products?

But, nature abhors a vacuum and there are crowd funding sites out there that are less heavy-handed on the restricted project list.  A friend of sssh.com, film-maker Shine Louise Houston, is in the middle of exploring porn-friendly crowd funding for her upcoming film, “SNAPSHOT“.

Snapshot Film Synopsis:

A freelance photographer and woman about town, Charlie has her sights set on Danny, an older butch in search of adventure and romance. Just as things are about to click, Charlie accidentally snaps a photo of a murder.  and becomes his new target. With a killer hot on her trail — and a new relationship developing — will Charlie find love… or her own demise?

Written and directed by Shine Louise Houston (The Crash Pad, Champion: Love Hurts), SNAPSHOT draws inspiration from film classics such as Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Antonioni’s Blow Up, featuring a diverse cast and intimate portrayals of queer sex in Houston’s signature cinematic style.

We spoke to Shine about her experience thus far in crowd funding this film and she gives a great peek behind the curtain from the perspective of a producer/director:

“As a smaller company working on the fringe of the adult industry, funding any project is a big concern. It’s a value of the company to produce our projects independently to keep full creative control over our work. But that stance poses some challenges. There’s always a computer that needs upgrading, more storage needed for the Crash Pad series archive, an IRS audit… and the list goes on. The company can fund about 15% of our new film budget but most of our revenue goes toward employee salaries and benefits and maintaining our website. So waiting to save up an extra 40K wasn’t an option.

That’s why we’ve taken the plunge into crowd funding. We’ve seen other campaigns on Kickstarter get pulled for being associated with the adult industry so we were very wary about heading a campaign of our own. We finally decided to go with Indiegogo and we were very upfront with them about being adult and asked them to review our campaign before it was launched. To our surprise we passed inspection. But two days into it our campaign was pulled, but not for reasons you would assume. Our raffle tickets in our VIP party perk were against their TOS. Who knew. Their explanation was that you can’t give a prize that is entrance into a contest. Fair enough. Since we pulled the raffle tickets it’s been smooth sailing…kind of.

I’m now stuck in an endless anxiety-filled loop of checking and rechecking the campaign, then Twitter then Facebook then the campaign again. Every time we get a new funder I get a surge of optimism and after a few hours of nothing at all I’m sure we’ll fail. It’s a mind fuck but the possibility of having a large enough budget for a script that I’ve been writing for the last 4 years is the most wonderful carrot that keeps me going. Will crowd funding be the golden ticket for this project and possibly future ones? I suppose I’ll find out in 35 days.”

Want To Help Save The World?

With that in mind, we at sssh.com, wasteland.com and eroticscribes.com enthusiastically encourage you, gentle reader, to go to the SNAPSHOT INDIEGOGO project page and be as generous as you can to support Shine’s project.  After all, we all want high quality new adult movies and this is one small way that you can make the world a better place (for good porn)!