Over the last month, I’ve noticed two big spikes in traffic on my vimeo.com videos page. Yesterday, my inbox was flooded with emails from people on Vimeo – commenting and “liking” my videos. The sudden influx surprised me and I suspected it had been linked to from somewhere.

To my pleasant surprise, I found that I had been featured on the Vimeo blog as someone whose work was worth checking out. Talk about humbling!

Here’s a screen shot (I added the arrows):

The second spike came earlier in the month, when Kickstarter featured my project on their blog! Here’s an excerpt:

Nathaniel Hansen is making a documentary which collects the short, stylized interviews he conducts with elderly people. His project was successful months ago, but he’s been keeping his backers in the loop by premiering finished clips (like the one above) and giving great production updates on his blog.

And another fab screenshot:

You can read the vimeo blog here and the kickstarter blog here.

Enjoy!

In line with Kickstarter.com guidelines, artists have a set number of days to raise all the funds, or the project receives nothing. Hansen’s film has an 18 day fundraising window, from start to finish. If the alloted budget ($11,000 US) isn’t raised before May 26, all pledges are cancelled and the film is not funded.

When asked about why Kickstarter was appealing, Hansen noted that “the ability to spread the word quickly online to a lot of people, and keep them updated on the status of the project is invaluable.” An added advantage for artists is Kickstarter’s merchant partner Amazon.com, which enables each project the convenience of receiving funds from anywhere in the world.

Hansen entered the online fundraising pool a little bit at a time. Another film he is co-producing about the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans was 135% funded after a 45 day fundraising effort. The project’s success gave Hansen the courage to go-it-alone with his own project, “Seeing the success of our other project gave me the courage to put my own film on the line.”

Hansen’s film The Elders, examines what it really means to live, by coming of age. A feature-length documentary, The Elders uses stylized interview portraits of elderly individuals to tell a universal story about life’s most important lessons. Thematically organized around life lessons that reflect a wide range of human emotion and experience, the film seeks to reveal a larger more complex portrait of our shared humanity.

If the film is successfully funded, Hansen expects to deliver the final cut before the end of the year. To learn more about the film, readers can visit the project’s pitch page here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nathanielhansen/the-elders-a-coming-of-age-documentary-portrait-se

About Nathaniel Hansen:
Nathaniel James Hansen is an award-winning filmmaker and media artist. His directed works include nationally broadcast commercials, short and feature-length documentaries, short narrative films, episodic television, web-based media, and ethnographic film. His documentary films have screened at festivals in the US and internationally, and most recently at the White House.

Contact:
Nathaniel Hansen
nh@nathanielhansen.com
Salmonrun Media LLC
702-513-5831

http://www.nathanielhansen.com

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As of this morning, I have just received some of that good fortune. This website that you’re reading, www.nathanielhansen.com, now ranks on the first page of Google for the search term “documentary filmmaker,” just a few spots down from one of my favorite documentary filmmakers “Errol Morris” whose work you can view here.

I have designed this site as a space to showcase my more personal and passionate projects which consist mostly of documentary short films and two upcoming feature length projects. To be successful as an independent filmmaker you have to be entrepreneurial. It’s no longer just enough to produce a film and release it to a festival. From the very start, the web in all it’s iterations must be part of the equation, and so must the project itself – it must be able to transcend traditional media boundaries and be portable to a variety of mediums (digital and analog).

In the coming weeks, I’ll start writing more about my two feature projects (as well as my shorts) so that I have a record of sorts to look back on in a few years. each project is unique, and involves so many components that are becoming fluid and natural to me, I’m hopeful that my experiences will be of use to those just getting started.

Filmmaker Philip Bloom

I thought I’d take a few minutes and type out my tribute to Philip Bloom as a way of saying “thanks” for some amazing work and to congratulate him on his recent success.

I’ve been following fellow filmmaker and blogger Philip Bloom for a couple years now. Ages ago I stumbled into an interesting blog while searching for affordable 35mm adapters and he had a post on his website reviewing two of the market contenders (both of which at that time were pretty much brand new – the brevis and the letus). He owned them both, and had sample footage of both. He wrote at length about their pros and cons. What an amazing resource!

What really got me though, was his sample footage. Here was a guy after my own heart shooting stuff I had previously only imagined – and he was shooting on gear that was within the realm of affordability! Cheesy as it sounds, it was nothing short of a revelation to me. So I emailed and picked his brain about lenses, cameras, rigs, etc, and he sent patient and detailed responses back. What a champ!

At the time I was living in Las Vegas, and every year I would head down to NAB (more out of tradition than it actually being a good show – it’s pretty much the same crap year after year – and I’ve been going for the last 6) to check out the latest wares. He posted on his blog that he would be in town if anyone wanted to hookup (he’s from London – I appreciated the effort to head to the middle of the desert), so I shot him a response and long story short we got together with some other guys downtown, and then the next evening I showed him a great place for a time lapse (the EX1 was just out) on top of the Red Rock Casino’s parking garage. The entire valley is in view from there. It was short and sweet but certainly good times. I joked with him that he should write a book or do tutorials or something, because the content was very valuable and absolutely worth paying for (Philip, if you’re reading, you can make the check out to Nathaniel Hansen).

Fast forward 2 years. Bloom is still cranking out work (honestly, I don’t know where he finds the time) and I’m all geared up and out shooting, but now living in Boston. Bloom’s work is taking off and he has a virtual following online. To say he’s busy would be an understatement. And this is where the story gets interesting and starts to sound like a script…

His website brings in thousands of requests for “more information” and he misses an email from Lucasfilm LTD producer Rick McCallum and a phone call from head of post production Mike Blanchard. Turns out they’re fans of his work and want some advice on an upcoming project (!) (This is the part where I would think to myself “Oh Crap. I don’t know what the heck I’m doing.”)

He heads out to Skywalker Ranch, ends up screening his work for Lucas, Quentin Tarantino (who happens to be there for a meeting) and a slew of ‘behind-the-scenes’ geniuses whose names you wouldn’t know but whose work sits in homes around the world on every DVD shelf.

It really is an amazing story, and I encourage you to check out his work and read about his incredible experience here.

I share this story not because I can say, “hey, I hung out with that guy once” (even though it’s kind of fun to say it), but to say that this is an amazing age we live in where a talented filmmaker can have a humble website (it’s come A LONG way since I first stumbled into it) where he posts his short videos and musings gets noticed and ends up hanging out with some of the greatest cinema talent of our day.

Thanks for sharing the post (it made my day) and for all your work Philip – and most of all, thanks for inspiring me to get up, get out, and get shooting.