Huit nouvelles sélections!

Classé dans : Festivals | 3

Le Gouffre va beaucoup voyager dans les prochains mois! Jetez un coup d’oeil aux villes et aux dates des nouvelles sélections de festivals, ça pourrait être votre chance de voir le film si ce n’est pas encore fait!

LosAngeles_official_selection

Los Angeles International Short Film Festival
Los Angeles, É-U – Juillet 24-31

Anibar_official_selection

Anibar International Animation Festival
Peja, Kosovo – Août 5-10

HollyShorts_official_selection

Holly Shorts Film Festival
Hollywood, USA – Août 14-23

Sidewalk_official_selection

Sidewalk Film Festival
Birmingham, É-U – Août 22-24

OffCourtsTrouville_official_selection

Off-Courts Trouville Film Festival
Trouville-Sur-Mer, France – Septembre 5-13

Burbank_official_selection

Burbank International Film Festival
Burbank, É-U – Septembre 3-7

Harlem_official_selection

Harlem International Film Festival
Harlem, É-U – Septembre 10-14

SanDiego_official_selection

San Diego Film Festival
San Diego, É-U – Septembre 24-28

Et pour ceux à Montréal, on vous rappelle que notre film sera présenté ce samedi au festival Fantasia. Il reste encore une centaine de places apparemment, alors n’hésitez pas à vous procurer un billet et vous joindre à nous! Voici la page de l’évènement pour plus de détails:

http://www.fantasiafestival.com/2014/en/films-schedule/spotlight/dieu-et-autres-contrees

On espère vous y voir en grand nombre!

07_29_thom

Belle réception à Palm Springs

Classé dans : Festivals | 1

Bonjour à tous!

On a de bonnes nouvelles pour Le Gouffre en ce beau début estival. D’abord, notre film a eu un très bel accueil au festival de Palm Springs où il a terminé deuxième pour le prix du public. Il a également été choisi pour faire partie du programme Best of Fest, ce dont nous sommes très fiers!

PalmSprings_international_shortfest_2nd_place

PalmSprings_international_shortfest_best_of_fest3

Le film a aussi été sélectionné dans trois nouveaux festivals. Ne manquez pas cette chance de voir Le Gouffre sur grand écran si vous êtes dans le coin!

supertoon_animation_festival_official_selection

SUPERTOON International Animation Festival
Šibenik (Croatie) – 27 juillet au 1 août

Flickers_rhode_island_int_film_festival_official_selection2

Flickers: Rhode Island International Film Festival (RIIFF)
Newport (USA) – 5-10 août

DC_shorts_film_festival_official_selection2

DC Shorts Film Festival
Washington DC (USA) – 11-21 septembre

Et pour finir, voici une entrevue que nous avons fait pour un site japonais il y a de cela plusieurs mois et qui vient tout juste d’être mise en ligne. Comme on se doute que peu d’entre vous peuvent comprendre le japonais, on a posté la version originale de nos réponse en anglais sous le lien.

http://anipipop.com/le-gouffre-animated-short-film/

Why did you choose Kickstarter to fund your project?

We didn’t plan on using Kickstarter (or any other crowdfunding platform) when we first started to work on our film. We took jobs, saved up money and then quit those jobs to do this project full time. Back then, we thought it would take only one year to do the whole film, but as we progressed we realized we needed another full year to push the quality of our movie as much as we wanted.

We tried twice to get a government grant for our project but it didn’t work out. That’s when we realized we needed more money and decided to turn to crowdfunding.
We chose Kickstarter because it is the most well known crowdfunding website and we figured it must have the biggest userbase. The website is well done, easy to use, and people know and trust it.

How long did it take to prepare all the materials and the team before the start of the campaign?

It took us a bit more than a month to get everything ready. We are a very small team (only 3 people) so everyone had to work very hard to prepare all that we needed. We were also working on our movie at the same time so it was a very rough month. We checked campaigns that had been successful as reference to see what works and what doesn’t. We had a lot of material ready to be shown since we had already been working on our film for more than a year. Our presentation video was recorded in only 2 days. We also announced on our blog that we would soon start a crowdfunding campaign.

How many people did you have running the campaign? What took the most of your time?

We were extremely busy during the funding period since we had to take care of the campaign and work on our movie at the same time! Like I said before, there is only three of us so we didn’t have a team taking care exclusively of the Kickstarter. It all happened so fast that it was hard to keep track of everything. Many people were asking questions, leaving comments, some people also offered to work on our project (which we refused for this particular project but we did keep every contact for possible collaborations in the future).

Overall, we didn’t have any major problem during the funding period. The only drawback was that answering everyone was very time consuming. When a campaign is over there are always a couple of pledges that get cancelled, usually because some credit cards get blocked for some reason. Contacting the backers that had problems like this can take some time too.

Did you experience any difficulty with pledgers after the campaign (sending reward, canceling, etc)?

Our movie is not done yet so we haven’t started to send the rewards to our backers. Most of our rewards are digital only so things should go pretty smoothly!

What did you do to « kickstart » your project when you launched your campaign? Did you experience any difficulty to promote your project?

One thing that really helped our Kickstarter campaign to get off the ground was our fanbase. Back when we first started working on this film, we created a blog (http://legouffre.com/en/) where we posted our progress regularly. Over a year, we managed to get around 300 followers. When our campaign started, these fans backed our project and helped to spread the word. Thanks to them, we reached our goal (that was very low, we only asked for 5000$) in 7 hours.

Where did most of your pledgers came from? What did you do to get them involved?

Our film was chosen as the « Project of the Day » on Kickstarter. This gave us amazing exposure. We also presented our project on many animation forums. We think the overall vibe of our project (serious and honest, but also light-hearted and funny at times) helped get people involved, even those that didn’t know us before.

In the end, most of our backers were either people related to our circle of friends, to the animation industry or people browsing Kickstarter that found us by luck.

How did people react after you success on Kickstarter?

We really hope that our movie will have an impact on people once they see it, but right now, with only our trailer and our Kickstarter campaign, it’s hard to say if people were affected by our project yet. Many people did give us wonderful comments, praising mostly our art style and animation, so it’s promising! Hopefully people will love the story too once they see the full film.

A lot of people were impressed by the « financial » side of our success and wanted to know how we did it. This interview is our most in-depth description of our experience with Kickstarter yet!

If you were to do a campaign again, what would you improve?

If we ever do another Kickstarter, it would probably be for a way bigger project so we would aim for a higher goal using what we learned this time. For this project, we didn’t plan a lot of « stretch goals », so when we reached the amount of money we needed, we didn’t have much more to offer to attract new backers. This was probably the weakest part of our campaign, so it’s something we would probably improve next time around.
Hopefully our fanbase will keep on growing as people will hear from us or see our film, and that too would be a huge help for future projects.


Many artists (especially in Japan) are still hesitating to start a project by themselves because there’s not much of a information on how to run a crowdfunding campaign in the animation field. Can you give us some advice for those artists?

We don’t know very well what is the situation of crowdfunding in Japan, but we do know there are absolutely amazing artists in that country. A lot of our favorite animation films come from Japan, and there might be some hint of these influences in our movie.

However, investing yourself in a campaign like this is a huge gamble. For us, it was a « last resort » type of move, because we were already all-in with this project from the very beginning when we quit our jobs. We might not have taken such a huge risk if we knew right from the start that it would take two years instead of one to do this and that we would have to rely on crowdfunding, but sometimes you have to be a little crazy and risk it all if you really believe in your dreams! Our naivety ended up being a blessing.
Our biggest advice would be to try to have fun! Do a project you love, don’t do it just for the money. You might go through some hard times, but in the end if you truly love what you do, it’ll be worth it and it’ll show in your work.

(fin de l’entrevue)

Voilà pour cette fois! On vous souhaite de profiter du beau temps, et revenez bientôt pour plus de nouvelles sur le Gouffre!

07_01_thom

Plus de festivals!

Classé dans : Festivals | 1

Et ça continue: Le Gouffre a été sélectionné dans quatre nouveaux festivals!

Lighthouse_official_selection_2

Lighthouse International Film Festival
Long Beach Island (USA) – 5 au 8 juin

PalmSprings_international_shortfest_official_selection_2

20th Annual Palm Springs International ShortFest and Film Market
Palm Springs (USA) – 17 au 23 juin

AnimaMundi_official_selection_2

22nd International Animation Festival of Brazil, Anima Mundi
Rio de Janeiro (Brésil) – 25 juillet au 3 août
Sao Paulo (Brésil) – 6 août au 10 août

Fantasia_official_selection_2

Fantasia – Le fantastique week-end du cinéma québécois
Montréal (Canada) – 31 juillet au 3 août

Tous ceux qui ont manqué la première à Montréal vont donc pouvoir se rattraper au festival Fantasia. Un rendez-vous à ne pas manquer où on sera très certainement présents!

D’ici là, portez-vous bien, et gardez un oeil sur notre blog pour tout savoir sur les derniers développements du Gouffre!

05_28_thom

Poster du film

Classé dans : Festivals | 2

Bonjour à tous!

Bien qu’on ait tous dû recommencer à travailler pour se renflouer un peu, on continue d’essayer de mettre autant de notre temps libre que possible au profit du Gouffre. Ces temps-ci on travaille majoritairement à terminer les récompenses Kickstarter, à savoir le vidéo Making Of, le Art Of PDF et le Poster du film… qui vient tout juste d’être terminé d’ailleurs!

LeGouffre_Poster_FR_small

Sur un autre sujet, le film a été projeté au USA Film Festival le 26 avril dernier et il parait que la réception a été bonne! Est-ce que certains d’entre vous ont pu y être? On n’a malheureusement pas pu y assister mais on a su que c’est le film Confusion Through Sand de Danny Madden qui a remporté le premier prix d’animation. On croise les doigts pour les prochains!

Sur ce, on vous souhaite un bon début d’été et à bientôt pour plus de nouvelles sur Le Gouffre!

05_08_thom

Première sélection officielle!

Classé dans : Festivals, Première | 5

Salut à tous!

On vient de recevoir une excellente nouvelle: le film a été sélectionné pour être en compétition officielle au USA Film Festival!

Il s’agit d’un festival important aux États-Unis et dont le premier prix d’animation pourrait nous valoir d’être éligibles pour les Oscars. On croise les doigts!

USA_film_festival_official_selection

On voudrait également en profiter pour remercier à nouveau tout le monde pour l’ambiance exceptionnelle à la première le 14 mars dernier. C’était vraiment magique!

Ne manquez surtout pas cet article à propos de l’événement:

Le Gouffre, un succès phénoménal! (La Petite Boite)

Petit message aussi pour tous ceux qui ont contribué au Kickstarter et qui se demandent quand nous enverrons les liens de téléchargement du film. Malheureusement, vous allez devoir patienter encore un peu! Plusieurs festivals refusent d’accepter des films qui ont déjà été mis sur internet et ça va être difficile à contrôler une fois qu’on aura envoyé le film à tout le monde. C’est pourquoi on souhaite attendre d’être davantage vers la fin de notre tournée des festivals avant de le faire. On vous tient au courant!

Merci et bonne semaine tout le monde!

04_02_thom

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