Kickstarter 8 Days Anno
As you can see here, we had most of our Kickstarter incentives basically cued up and ready to print or e-print from the start. (Man, thinking about Sketchies is a weird trip now.) The big exception was, of course, the animations, and we ultimately had to choose between funding those and funding just about everything else (including our bonus comics and the printed volumes 2 and 3). Not a hard choice for me; I think it was a bit harder for Phil, who’d had pre-existing relationships with Matt Lebrun, Phi Tran, and Dain Saint, and some ambitions of his own as a filmmaker.
ICYMI, the script for the animated adventure is here. That should be enough reading for today!
Might wanna include a link. I just came back to the site randomly and don’t see any link to the Kickstarter.
This kickstarter is long over, it’s annotations for the old kickstarter advertisements now
“THRE ANIMATED SHORTS”.
So what does the annotation post means? That the animations didn’t get made after they were funded?
That’s certainly how it sounds; as always, it’s unfortunate. I actually wouldn’t mind hearing a little more about that, since this is making me remember this drive faintly. I wasn’t sure about the teaser-promo-animation from yesterday, but that “FILL MY FACE WITH FUNDS!” Frigg is something that I KNOW I remember and I don’t recall what, if anything, was said about said animations after this.
I don’t recall the Kickstarter absolutely blowing past the goals, so I wonder if it’s just a case of having overreached on stretch goals/underestimating the cost of animation, of if something else happened. And hopefully it didn’t cause animosity with the fanbase.
If they actually got funded but didn’t get made, I gotta be honest that’s a bit… yikes, as them kids say.
Well, you’re not wrong. I went into my feelings on the matter a bit here, and I expect I’ll discuss them more when I get to the part of Guilded Age‘s story where we realized it wasn’t going to happen.
I’m a bit careful in discussing this one, because I had little to do with it, Phil doesn’t want to talk about it, I don’t really have contact with anyone else involved, and it’d therefore be easy for me to make some bad assumptions. And I do a pretty delicate balancing act between assigning credit and blame to me and Phil as it is.
The most important part of the story is that we underestimated some costs (some to do with animation, some to do with shipping), overestimated projected revenues from book sales and advertising, and got ourselves into the position you never want to be in, a position where we had to decide which of our promises to break.
There was little fan outcry in response, and I think there would have been more if we’d cut something more immediately tangible, like the extra comics or the printed Volume 3. I do regret it, of course, and the experience has added to the list of things I’m never going to do again (a Kickstarter? Maybe. A Kickstarter where I don’t have all the expenses triple-checked and everything ready to go except for payments made? Definitely, definitely not). At the same time, I really don’t have the power to do anything about it (everyone involved moved on after six months or so), so I just have to live with it.
I gotta be honest I am a bit surprised old hands like you two didn’t have those numbers ironed before even setting any kind of goal, but I’m just glad it didn’t have too big a backlash to harm your reputations. An angry fan can be worse than a person that didn’t initially liked the product.
And maybe, just maybe, lucky to not have happened recently. There’s been quite a few Kickstarters for video games (MMOs mostly that I know of, since I only follow those) that have been shady recently so people might’ve over-reacted here due to growing frustrations and distrust with crowdfunding in general.
In making comics, we were old hands, but in shipping merch and producing cartoons, we had a few things to learn.
See my response below!
Sorry to hear the animated shorts were never produced. (That’s what I was asking about on the previous day’s comments, I could see the kickstarter promo just fine.)
But thanks for the link to the script. While we might not get to see a full production, I can at least visualize it in my imagination.