THE UNDERWATER REALM & The Rise Of Crowdfunding Movies

Last summer I was working on an independent feature when I came in one morning to find the production office abuzz with hushed gossip and Chinese whispers. Pretty quickly I found out the news: the UK Film Council was to be abolished. The immediate reaction seemed to be concern; what’s the next chapter for the UK film industry? Who will fill the gap? People shouted and petitioned, a number of high profile actors and directors got involved, but it was no good. By 31st March 2011, the UKFC was closed for business.

Cut to nine months later and a house in South Devon, where director David M. Reynolds is launching an appeal – via online crowdfunding website Kickstarter – to publically fund his latest venture, The Underwater Realm. The project is a series of short films taking its audience from the height of the Roman empire right through to modern day, chronicling the five times humans have come into contact with a race of people living in the ocean. It’s arguably one of the most ambitious independent films undertaken in the UK and, to make things yet more exciting, David has just over thirty days to raise $60,000 for it.

Along with his three housemates, David makes up the core of Realm Pictures, an independent production company with the aim to make large scale, highly engaging and entertaining films on unfeasibly low budgets. If film could be divided into two camps, one which uses cinema to portray and comment upon a putative reality and the other which seeks to whisk us away from it to escape into fantastical stories and worlds, Realm Pictures would sit firmly in the latter. And they’re looking for your help to do it.

As well as the obvious gain of being able to move ahead on production, crowdfunding is a great way to generate interest in the project and build a strong fan base whilst the films are still being made. As David explains, ‘with Kickstarter our audience are able to fund us (or not fund us) based on how much they want to see the films we are making. It’s a great way to cut out all of the red tape that gets in the way of making films.’

Crowdfunding isn’t a particularly new concept in the world of independent cinema – early crowd funded features can be traced back to 2004 with the film Demain la Veille and short films have been popping up all over Kickstarter since the site’s 2009 launch – but there seems to be something of a perfect storm engulfing Realm’s latest project that is starting to turn a lot of heads, a variety of events that have put the homegrown filmmakers in a remarkably exciting position.

One of the most important of these events was the rise of digital cinematography. As the cameras shrunk, the prices dropped and cameras capable of capturing extraordinarily cinematic images in the right hands have become readily available to the mass market in the past few years. In addition to affordable post-production packages like Adobe Creative Suite this led to something of an explosion in low or no-budget filmmaking and afforded many people a previously unattainable opportunity to make themselves known and tell the kind of stories that weren’t traditionally associated with independent film. A great example of this is Gareth Edward’s Monsters – a movie where the filming equipment cost less than $15,000 and visual effects were all created by the director, working out of his bedroom.

At the same time, social media became a great way not only for filmmakers to share their content, but to promote their projects and build a closer relationship with their audience. Who’d have thought ten years ago that we’d be able to hear the random daily thoughts of David Lynch, Duncan Jones or Kevin Smith, or to interact with them? In many ways, the gap between the audience and the mysterious yet ubiquitous world of cinema has been closing with each passing year and it’s exciting to see where it’ll go next.

Strangely enough, the collapse of the UK Film Council wasn’t part of this perfect storm. Did it affect Realm Pictures at all? ‘Being perfectly honest’, David says, ‘I wasn’t that bothered. I have always been a bit uncomfortable with the ‘hand-out’ system, it leads us Brits to hide behind the banner of ‘arty’ and ‘important’ films to get our films funded, instead of thinking about what audiences actually want to see.’ It’s true that the UKFC weren’t known for funding the kind of films that David and the rest of the team make. In the years before its fall, the council was putting money into filmmakers like Ken Loach, Shane Meadows and Andrea Arnold, as well as films such as Nowhere Boy, Happy-Go-Lucky and Brideshead Revisited – not quite the same territory as an underwater fantasy epic.

The rise of crowdfunding, on the other hand, has proved to be quite timely for their upcoming project. Realm Pictures has always seemed to keep a close relationship with its audience, providing weekly video blogs and updates for months during pre-production of The Underwater Realm. Now that they’ve come to a point where they really need the help of their fans to continue, a lot of people seem willing to come to their aid because of the exposure Realm has already given the project; people are already invested. ‘We have been doing the weekly blog since day one – way before we had funding of any sort. At the end of the day, the audience will dictate your success or failure… if you have an audience, you have a career.’ As is the way with Kickstarter, they’re not just asking for free money: pledges are broken down into tiers and you can receive anything from a digital download of the films through to DVDs, tutorials, set visits or even an invitation to the London premiere. The packages they’re offering seem impressively full and varied for a campaign like this and such a level of engagement with the audience seems to be something core in Realm’s outlook.

There seems to be a strong rise of high quality, micro-budget features coming out of the UK in the past few years (Kate Madison’s Born of Hope, Chris Bouchard’s The Hunt For Gollum and Realm’s own debut feature Zomblies) and perhaps this doesn’t have anything to do with the fall of the UKFC, but I think its abolition signalled the beginning of something new. There’s a wealth of talent across the UK film industry and it seems like half of it is only just beginning to emerge. Will the UK be known for its big budget fantasy epics in a decade’s time? Probably not, but it’s exciting to see a new wave of filmmakers with different stories to tell.

As for David and Realm Pictures, it’s currently up to us what their next step is going to be. Something tells me that David is the kind of director who would shoot the film on an iPhone in a fish tank if there was no other way. But hopefully it won’t come to that. Whether or not their Kickstarter campaign is successful, I’m sure they’ll continue to engage with their audience on a regular basis and keep everyone updated with the project. As David says, ‘being open and honest with the fans is really important, not least of all for the team working here. It keeps us energised, engaged with our audience and reminds us why we work every hour God sends.’

We’ll find out just how much the audience wants to see The Underwater Realm very soon, as the campaign is shortly entering its final week. If you think it’s the kind of story you want to get behind, take a look at the site here.

Tags: The Underwater Realm