The panel on the first day of the Rotterdam Lab was led by Michael Gubbins, former editor of Screen International, who is now associated with Power to the Pixel, the UK-based cross-media initiative supporting content creators and distributors who are interested in finding alternate means particularly, I think, of content finance and distribution.

If you need more context, think Ted Hope and Lance Weiler, both of whom have more than passing associations with the organzation. And if you must, think Thomas Woodrow too, because as of that panel, I'm mighty interested in what they're doing also.

In the photo, you'll see (L to R): Michael Gubbins and filmmakers Ho Yuhang, Alexis dos Santos and yes, by total coincidence, Pippilotti Rist.

So on February 1 (a date very near and dear to my heart) the Rotterdam International Film Festival began an initiative called Cinema Reloaded, which is a Kickstarter.com-style fundraising platform supporting three projects by three filmmakers (Yuhang, dos Stantos, and Rist). Check out a video made from the panel discussion I saw here.

The way Cinema Reloaded works is that you can go to the website, buy "coins" and put these coins toward whichever project(s) you deem most worthy. There is a progress bar of a kind and a funding date, at which point the respective projects receive the money that has been earmarked for them by the audience, to go toward production.

I think this is the best idea I've heard since I learned about Kickstarter.com itself. While presumably the Festival is not itself in a position to finance the films it supports, just like it's not quite in a position to actually produce or distribute the films it supports, it's lending the imprimatur of its name in an only slightly more direct way, such that the filmmakers can jump off from that point themselves and audiences have a place to direct their attention and an easy means of becoming directly involved.

What's more, it is a means of generating rich publicity for the projects, via the support of the festival, substantially before they're produced. This means that when they actually DO hit festivals or the marketplace, they will already have dedicated friends, fans and followers at the ready to both see the film and spread the word. Obviously, this kind of personal investment is critical in a moment where films and media projects in general vie more than ever for limited audience attention.

As a Sundance Producing Fellow this year, I wonder if it might not make sense for the Sundance Institute to offer a similar opportunity to Sundance Lab projects, at least those that are going through the Producing Lab, and which are therefore theoretically pretty far down the development pike and are contemplating pre-production.

Only thinking out loud, here, but perhaps the Institute could even lend its non-profit status to the supported projects as a fiscal sponsor, and hence allow the filmmakers to accept "donations" in exchange for "pledge gifts" in the form of pre-sales of DVD's of the film, or simply being part of a project's mailing list. This would be particularly attractive to potential donors if the filmmakers generated little videos or audio podcasts updating them as to their progress through production and on into distribution. This would effectively mean making the "special features" available before the film was made as a way of building audience attention and involvement, at the same time raising seed development and/or production finance for the film itself.

Bass ackwards indeed.

I learned from my Kickstarter initiatives (one a decent success, the other a clear failure) that it's important to frame the goal well, make sure that it's something the potential audience might find enticing, and then give yourself a low enough bar and a great enough amount of time that you are more or less guaranteed to hit it.

If you were to set the start date of a film project on the Sundance Institute website and set a hittable goal as a component of your production financing with enough lead-time to create a good likelihood of success, I think it might become a race by the audience to help you get there.

I say so often that I imagine people are tired of hearing me do so: "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?" The answer to the Cartesian riddle is "no." So you have to make sure there is a reason that people will bend their ears if you're going to try to do something like crowdsource money for a film project.

Sundance has proven for over two decades that it is an awfully good platform for getting exactly this kind of attention.