First off I’d like to say Thank You to all 127 people who backed our Kickstarter! Your support means a lot and goes a long way in helping us create future films. Unfortunately we didn’t meet our goal on Kickstarter and you will not be charged for your support of the Kickstarter. If you’d like take that money and spend it to support future Montana Wild Fishing films please consider supporting our new film SKWALHALLA which will release in full on February 1st. You can currently pre-order the film and be entered into a giveaway for a Simms hip pack.
The failure of this campaign probably was a result of quite a few things. Starting the campaign over the holidays meant people had and were spending their hard earned money elsewhere, we also had less than a week to plan and create the Kickstarter which was just a necessity given our time and hunting season lasting till the end of November. With little time to plan the campaign it was tough to convey what the funding would actually go towards. The reason we wanted to raise $12,000 was to fund the actual production of a film given the guidelines of our Kickstarter campaign. A five part web series and a film released through iTunes, Amazon, and Vimeo On Demand would have cost well in excess of $12,000. Permits for commercial filming would have cost in excess of $350 per day in NZ and trying to capture a 5-6 week trip would have been a costly endeavor. Add in music licensing which would have been thousands and then paying a 3rd party to upload to iTunes and Amazon and we are pushing 10K easy. Then add in our time and extra expense to take time to film and properly document our trip each day and then spend weeks to edit and you can see that it is a costly project. A few haters had a good time claiming this was just a way to fund an extravagant trip to NZ. That’s false as we will still be going to NZ on our own dime and no we aren’t trust fund babies, we do in fact work like everyone else for our money.
With that said we will no longer be filming Bucknasty Browns as outlined in our Kickstarter campaign. The chances of us doing any filming outside of some personal shots is slim to none. That brings me to my final point, if you do in fact value our fishing films and want to continue to see us create more we NEED your support. If half our followers rented our film SKWALHALLA we would be planning a LOT more fishing films. Right now that’s far, far from the case despite over 20K views of the trailer in the first week. And as you can read HERE, that film took us three years and was funded 100% out of our own pocket to try to give our fans something they’ve yet to see and get them stoked to set foot on the river with fly rod in hand.
The content landscape is quickly changing but without fan support our content delivery which includes lots of free content will be diminished. The market will dictate our actions and right now it’s shifting in ways difficult to predict. If you have comments, advice or input related to this or fishing films in general we’d love to hear from you. And again, thank you to those who have supported our projects, the Kickstarter and future films and projects!
