Earlier this week, The Yes Men wrote a blog post for Creative Capital detailing the various ways they have funded their feature-length projects over the past decade. They first received a Creative Capital grant in 2000 and received a MAP Fund grant in 2008 and have since worked with HBO, toured to Sundance, and recently turned to crowd funding platforms to support their work. Read on for an excerpt on the challenge of crowdfunding from the full post.
…because it seems from the outside to work, crowdfunding allows us to accept a situation in which public grants are non-existent. Why mourn the loss of the NEA and the like? The real answer is: because artists and activists must now spend the bulk of their time cajoling a crowd, rather than challenging them.
The lack of public funding affects us directly, and also through our distributors: without any public support, the margins for these companies are so small that we need to share the burden if we want to make our films fly. We’re lucky to have a distributor on board, but it’s way harder than it was when we started. Unless we want all films to be aimed at the lowest common denominator, we’d better wake up, and soon.
Read the full post here.
The Yes Men Are Revolting, the third movie in a series that began fifteen years ago with a Creative Capital grant, will premiere on iTunes, VOD and Vimeo June 9th and in theaters June 12th. Join the revolt on Twitter by following @TheYesMen.