What are Development Funds?

Filmmaking Sucks

Manny and Lindsay take on a subject that many independent filmmakers are unaware of this week, and that is Development Funds. This area of your budget is not always necessary, and it depends on what your film budget is actually going to be.
What are development funds? Where does this money come from? When do you pay it back (if at all)? How does this affect your films budget as a whole? Where do you investors fit into this fund?
As part of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts Women Filmmakers series, we sat in on the "Working Above the Micro-Budget Level" Workshop with Naomi McDougall Jones and Sarah Wharton where this was discussed. So we got this straight from two sources who have done it themselves, and we are here to share what we learned with you.
Catch us at the Severed VHS Trade and Short Film Night, this Saturday May 27th, where we will be premiering our new short film, Knock Knock, and we will have a table for the day. Grab tickets here: www.shermantheater.com/?e=event&eventId=21952&rDate=5/27/2017
And Sunday May 28th, you can see our new film Theta States at the First Contact Film Festival at 2:40pm, along with a full day of other indie horror and scifi films. Tickets are $10 for the day, and you can get them here: filmfreeway.com/festival/firstcontact/tickets

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“When you’re making an independent film, it’s like this actor plus this actor equals this funding, this financing. Pull this actor out, this actor is still here but this money’s gone. It’s this frightening puzzle mosaic that is the world of independent film.”

— Jill Soloway