We feel our audience will, of course, be fans of independent games and gamers in general. But because the film is so much about design and the creative process, we think it can appeal to wider audience of people who don't necessarily identify themselves as gamers but, perhaps, as appreciators of art. At least, that's what we sincerely hope.
This agenda is subtle throughout the film, but ever-present and overarching. In some ways, you could remove the term “video game” from the film and replace it with “film” or “book” or “painting” and I'm sure the individual journeys of its characters will still ring true.
TGAM: Has it been a difficult project? Have you received funding from any investors or government agencies? I noticed that you're soliciting support from the community on your website...
James: It has been a challenge. Indie Game: The Movie is quite ambitious in scope. We are a two-person production that is following teams, talking to a lot of people, gathering a lot of footage, and trying to create in a professional manner something that hasn’t been seen before.
But at the same time, we are traveling the world telling the stories of brilliant, creative people. The whole process is equally exhausting, intimidating, and rewarding. In fact, in many ways our filmmaking process echoes the experience of independent game developers.
The film’s budget has been a combination of crowd-funding, personal investment, and winnings from a Los Angeles documentary film pitch competition we took part in. Within 48 hours of announcing the film we had raised the majority of our eventual money—$23,000 in total on Kickstarter.com, a website that allows people to donate to creative projects that they would like to see become a reality. We’ve also been consistently selling DVD pre-orders from our website. Community support has been huge.
We haven’t accessed any government funding for this film (though we do intend to access Manitoba’s filmmaking tax credit system). We took an audience-first approach. We thought the best strategy was to put the idea out to the people who would be our eventual audience. If they liked the idea, and thought we could do it justice, we figured the support would be there. On the other hand, if we didn’t get the enthusiastic response that we did we would have had to wonder if this was a film that needed to be made. Luckily for us, we haven’t been given any reason to wonder.
