First thing I'm going to address is financials. And the first thing I will state is that anyone who thinks this entire documentary was an opportunistic money grab scam, frankly, has no idea what they're talking about. They don't know how money works, how businesses work, or how the film industry works.
We spent more money than we got from the Kickstarter working on this project, especially because there are some hidden costs that a lot of people don't really realize. We had to hire producers, writers, editors, and directors. We had to hire loggers, audio specialists, color correctors, and DVD designers. We had to hire cameramen, microphone boom operators, media managers. We had to hire lawyers, musicians, artists, and animators. We had to pay for flight tickets, hotel rooms, taxi drivers, and food/water. We had to buy hard drives, computer systems, cameras, microphones, SD cards, and a ton of editing programs and utilities. We had to pay for DVD replicators, label printers, poster printers, distributors. And the list goes on… and on… and on.
In short, film-making is a complex, complicated, time-consuming, and EXTREMELY expensive process. These costs stack up. FAST. A lot of people don't quite realize how much money goes into making a film. Most feature-length documentaries cost millions - of - dollars, and we had $340k, which isn't quite pocket change, but it's certainly not a luxurious amount. A huge chunk of that $340k was spent on Kickstarter bonuses.
Not only that, there was a human cost. Many of the top-level staff completely abandoned their own personal salaries to work on this doc. The lead Exec Producer, Michael Brockhoff, spent almost every single hour of every single day for ten months working on it. Normally he makes well over average salary a year, but the doc took so much of his time up that he completely stopped his day job in order to work on the film. The whole time, he was making virtually NOTHING. Meanwhile, rent was stacking up, he had to pay bills, and he had to feed himself. That's his personal financial contribution to this project: anywhere between $50k to $100k worth of his own time. Completely lost.
And then there's people like me, who do this for a living. I was one of the employees. I was one of the costs of the documentary. The money went to my living expenses: food, water, gas, and other things like that. All of which I will soon no longer be able to pay for.
inu jsme v Čechách...![[Obrázek: mlfw8529_small.png]](http://pinkie.mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/rsz/mlfw8529_small.png)
