Great question! In 'Little Wonder', two friends go on adventure to escape the stresses of modern life when they tell ghost stories before going on their next quest. This film will have a majority queer cast and crew!
We're looking to raise around £2000 to cover the costs of production, so hopefully you can help!
As a writer & filmmaker who’s queer and trans, I’m perpetually looking for new ways to integrate authentic, meaningful representation into engaging and fun stories. ‘Little Wonder’ is importantly not another story about queer characters where they experience prejudice or trauma, but moreso a demonstration of the joys of being queer, and being in a circle of accepting, like-minded friends, and how beautiful accepting who you are can be, in spite of the dismal political and social climate levied against the community.
While the story does delve into some more difficult aspects of the trans experience, I feel it’s important for contextualising character relationships, and ultimately it resolves in a way that’s positive and hopefully reassuring for any audience members going through a similar situation.
As of launching this crowdfunder, we’re currently about halfway through the pre production stage. We’ve not yet cast, and the script is in bones, but while the funding is live, we should be able to get to a place where production isn’t far away!
With that in mind, the release of the project is fairly hard to roadmap, but thinking optimistically about it, a Q4 2023/early 2024 release currently feels achievable should we meet our funding goals; but again, whatever happens, you as backers will be the first to know!
The moodboard for this project ^
We want to shoot some parts of this project on Super 8 film, ideally all of it, but film is expensive to buy, process, and scan, so depending on how much we raise, it’s most likely going to be a combination of digital footage that’s edited to look like Super 8, and a few parts that are actually shot with a Canon 514XL.
Though the technologically inclined amongst you may be dubious of this approach, I’m confident that having genuine Super 8 shots as a reference will mean that our digital footage matches up fairly seamlessly. (And even if this all goes wrong, which is an ever-present risk in filmmaking, we will be recording digital right alongside every shot we take on Super 8, so there will always be a back-up,
Our main priority with the money other than that is more of the regular costs one would expect from filmmaking:
- Paying & feeding cast & crew
- Buying props & costumes
- Travel
- Etc…
Some say the first rule of filmmaking is that everything can go wrong, no matter how much you prepare, and sadly, we’re not exempt from that either.
There might be delays in production, unforeseen circumstances, technological failure, and a myriad of other things, but I’ve been involved in making short films for around eight years now, and my experience with them & academia has made me very adaptable & proficient with handling on-the-fly changes. But anything could happen.
Bottom line is, if you’re committed to funding the project, I’m committed to finishing it, and even if we don’t make so much, I’ll give it my best effort either way. Whatever happens, I’ll be sure to keep you all updated, both here, and on the various social media channels.