5 Reasons Why You Should Give Me Your Money
So I'm making a web series. It's called Gemma & The Bear.
Good friend and collaborator, Kevin R. Free and I have been working on the project for over a year and we're just over a week away from the end of our Indiegogo campaign.
It's tough to raise money for lots of reasons, chief among them that asking for money is hard for most people most of the time. I've often heard that it's easy to ask for money (or anything else) for someone else - a favorite organization, say - but so much harder to ask for yourself. I agree, generally, but I am so passionate and excited about this project, that it's making the asking quite a bit easier, which I think is one of the best indicators that our project is a) pretty wonderful and special; b) ready to come to life.
Here are FIVE reasons that you (yes, YOU) should invest in Gemma & The Bear:
1. You'll enjoy watching my show. (Not sure? Check out this highly informational page including adorable videos!)
2. You are (or aspire to be) a patron of the arts. You love to consume creative content and so you support the creation and production of that content.
3. You care about a diversity of artistic voices; you value writers/creators from a variety of backgrounds and experiences - not just a bunch of white guys (as delightful as those guys are).
4. You want the world you watch (on TV, Film or, in this case, the internet) to reflect the world around you; you want to see casting that is diverse. (We've made a creative and a philosophical commitment to a cast as diverse as the city in which we live; race is just one type of diversity but, as an example, of our five principal cast members only two are white.)
5. You want to see something NEW. We've all heard it: there are no new ideas, but some ideas are a lot less threadbare than others. Have you ever seen a sit-com spin on Jekyll and Hyde? Neither have we.
The world isn't fair. Maybe you've read some of the articles making the rounds about how in the arts rich kids are elbowing out those who are less well-off because money equals opportunity. That's old news, but that doesn't mean we need to embrace the status quo. You can vote with your feet (aka your dollars) by showing support for the kind of art you value - not just the art (cough cough reality TV cough cough) you're given.
I think you make the world a better place by supporting the arts that move you . . .
. . . and c'mon . . . this video is really freaking adorable.