Raising Funds & going it alone..

We thought after having some success with Attack of the Herbals, raising a budget for our new feature would be easier.

I was wrong.  We missed out on the networking attached to promoting Attack of the Herbals by signing with sales agent Camelot Entertainment before it was finished.  Looking back this was probably a mistake.  If we had taken Attack of the Herbals to some UK  film festivals, we would have been able to mix with producers & other film makers which in hindsight could have helped when looking for investment for our new film.

There is a lot of tax breaks & incentives for investors in the film industry.  There is SEED EIS & EIS, this allows investors to get up to 50% tax relief given by way of reductions of tax liability..

I put together a business plan (which took months of work) & come up with what I thought was a watertight plan, one that I knew investors would be interested in.  We became SEED EIS assured, were offering 30% of our business shares & profits to get our investment.  Our story & script was good - I mean the Evil Scottish Highlander... that's a cool killer!  The actors we had planned for were great, & the horror genre is worldwide commercial, so i'm thinking with some money behind us, we could potentially make an amazingly scary horror & better... a lot of money.  Getting an investor will be easy now right.... Wrong!

I spent a lot of my time after that trying to find ways of getting my plan into the right hands.  I even spent a fortune uploading my plan onto 'angel' investment schemes. 

We gave ourselves a year while David developed the script to get an investment, then in April 2013 myself & David sat down and decided that we had two options keep waiting or scale back the production & pay for it ourselves again. 

David always said he wouldn't make another film unless we got enough money to hire a proper crew, but here we are again with the prospect of going it alone again.....  Can pull together half decent actors that are willing to see the potential and work on deferral?  Can we pull a crew together that will work on deferral & that we can rely on?  I know if we were paying them properly we could guarantee everyone was on board & would work hard, turn up etc, but if people are doing it for free (even if we are paying them as soon as the film makes money) can we rely on them....  Scary thought.

Here is another problem.....  as we cannot pay & are using people who have REAL jobs, we face the sad fact that the only time we can shoot is weekends, which means we will be working for weeks on end without a break (between corporate video & feature) for the foreseeable future.

Decision made... We are going to go it alone.  Dave goes back to the script & scales it back..  minimises the cast, locations & I get rid of my wish list of prosthetics, props, make-up & equipment.

Our film has gone from micro-budget to none existing budget. 

6 months on, having highs & lows, somehow 15 days into our 40 day production everything good or bad has up to now worked out for the best.