About: Indie Film Backers

Why we exist

Independent film has two persistent problems that describe each other.

If you make films

The money is the wall. Not the idea, not the crew, the money, and the growing list of things you're expected to handle yourself. A funding page, an email list, a poster to spec, captions, a festival calendar, a press kit. Bigger films hire people for all of it. You do it at midnight, or you skip it and it costs you the audience.

If you back films

You've already proven you'll put your own money behind work you believe in, which makes you the rarest thing in this industry. But once the campaign ends and the perk arrives, the relationship usually ends too. You hear nothing until the next ask, and a lot of what you funded never arrives at all.

Those are the same problem seen from two sides. So we work both: we do the jobs filmmakers can't afford to hire out, and we keep the people who fund them properly informed. And we're upfront that this is a business, because a company that hides that is a company you should be suspicious of.

The money

Where ours comes from.

Asked plainly, answered plainly. This is usually the part that goes missing from a site like this.

Paid services

Our main revenue today. Flat fees for defined work, funding pages, campaign management, email and social, listing, release materials. Quoted before we start. See what we sell.

Our own films

This is the plan, not the current income. We intend to produce and part-finance our own work and earn from it. That's a later phase, it needs a legal structure we don't have yet.

What is not revenue

What isn't revenue: we don't sell shares, and we don't sell anyone access to money. Joining costs nothing and stays that way. If that ever changes, it'll be stated here before it happens.

How we work

Small on purpose. Every introduction is made by a person who has actually read what you wrote, there is no matching algorithm, and we're not building one. A machine can compare keywords; it can't tell whether someone's honest answer about being stuck means they're worth backing.

That means we're slower than a platform, and it means we can only handle a few things at a time. We think that's the correct trade.

One commitment we'll be held to

Nothing we introduce goes quiet. If someone we put you in touch with stops responding, that's our problem to solve, not something you shrug off. Going silent is the most common reason people stop backing independent films, and it's the one failure we can actually prevent.

Who's behind it

Travis Pflanz and Brandon Prewitt met in Kansas City, and it didn't stay a friendship for long before it became a production. Dough of the Dead was Brandon's capstone project for his graduate degree in Communications, and that mattered more than it sounds: the assignment was never just writing, shooting, and editing a short film. It was the entire machine around it. Real local PR and cold outreach to news stations that somehow produced over a hundred extras for one midnight shoot in a working restaurant, a genuine public screening at a local arts theater alongside a slate of other local shorts, and an actual release, DVDs included. That was the first time either of them ran a production from a blank page all the way to an audience paying money for it, and it's the same shape of problem this company exists to solve for everyone else.

The premise owes a real debt to the news of 2012, a summer thick with genuine "bath salts" face-eating headlines that were, if anything, stranger than the movie. Brandon's answer was to shrink that chaos down to the only kind he actually understood, closing time at a pizza joint, and let two broke pizza-slingers try to out-live a zombie outbreak armed with a dough cutter and worse attitudes.

Travis Pflanz in character on the set of Dough of the Dead, 2012 — **Travis Pflanz**, on camera
Dough of the Dead (2012)

Brandon Prewitt operating the camera on the set of Dough of the Dead, 2012 — **Brandon Prewitt**, behind the camera
Dough of the Dead (2012)

Watch the trailer or the whole half-hour film on YouTube.

Brandon kept going. He's since produced and assistant-directed a steady run of independent genre features out of the Cincinnati film scene, work you can look up on IMDb the same way we'd expect you to look us up. Travis builds the other half, running website development and digital marketing work out of Kansas City, which is the entire reason this company exists in the form it does: one of us knows what a production actually needs, and the other knows how to go and get it. We'll keep this section short for now; the work will do the rest of the talking.

I am an indie filmmaker I am an indie film backer