When we were setting up our Indiegogo campaign over four months ago, one of the things we selected during the Pre-Launch phase was an option called "InDemand". InDemand basically allows you to extend your fundraising campaign if you meet (or beat) your fundraising goal.
Some of you may recall that after 30 days, when we realized we were not going to meet our $10K goal, we learned of an option that allowed us to extend our campaign for another 30 days. This was not something we knew about and is not widely publicized by Indiegogo. When we extended, we were told that we could only extend once. So another 30 days passes and literally in the final hours of the campaign, we beat our goal of $10K and then our $11K Stretch Goal!
We were thrilled to have surpassed our goal. After all, no Star Trek fan film that we know of has managed to raise over $10K since the fan film guidelines were issued. So as we watched the clock tick down in the wee hours of the morning on June 4, we breathed a collective sigh of relief, patted ourselves on the back, and thought that was the end of our two-month fundraising marathon.
Well....
As it turns out, Indiegogo still keeps the InDemand function viable even if you've already extended once. This isn't something we knew about or were even thinking of - I had long forgotten about even clicking the InDemand button all those months ago.
So here we are a week after our campaign is ended and our Indiegogo is still active. We've even managed to raise a few hundred dollars and we haven't even been promoting the project at all (how are you people finding out about us? And where were you a month ago?!?)
Anyway, some of you might be asking...
Why are you doing this?
Didn't you hit your goal?
Why are you still fundraising if you got all the funding you said you needed?
Those are good questions and the answers, I think, are pretty simple.
If we keep the campaign open and continue to raise funds, it allows us to expand the scope of our story and to focus on details and fine-tuning that we might have glossed over before.
For example, now we can enhance our virtual sets and make them more detailed. We can apply some good EQ to our audio tracks instead of the preset settings that we would have used before. We can render our visual effects shots in better quality (and maybe even add those Starfleet Museum ships that everyone keeps demanding to see!) We also now have the ability to work in some bonus content which we can make available exclusively to our backers!
All of this assumes, of course, that our backers and other interested parties continue to put the word out about us, recommend us to their friends, or even contribute a second time. We briefly considered the idea of setting another fundraising goal to film a whole new scene, but for now we are tabling that idea while we see how the production timeline flows.
For now, any new contributions coming to TRW are going to be directed towards detailing, adding new elements into existing scenes, and producing exclusive content for our backers to enjoy while they wait for the finished film - which we still hope to have delivered by the end of 2018.
So if you know a Star Trek fan who hasn't heard about The Romulan War, let them know that yes, they can still contribute. And while many of our original perks have sold out, we do still offer some great ones - not the least of which is that all TRW backers get access to the cool extra features and content on Memory Alpha that nobody else has access to! Please keep spreading the word about us and be patient as we engage at warp speed to finish the film.
Once again, thanks to our supporters and LLAP!
- Mark