Computer Animated Film Collaboration

Hello,

My name is Benjamin and I started a small three person computer animated short film collaboration on June 6th 2009. Since then, we have expanded to more than twenty-five artists and are continuing to grow. Most of us have moderate to expert experience in video game developing and wanted to 'hit 2 industries with one keyboard' by creating short films for the film festival circuits both nationally and internationally.

Donald McKay built his ships in East, Boston in the 1800's. I am 1st-cousin-6-times-removed to Donald McKay. I named my animation collaboration after his clipper ship the Flying Cloud for it's speed on her maiden Voyage to San Francisco from New York City in 89 days. Thus, our animation collaboration is to produce quality short films with originality, creativity, and ingenuity.

With a brief background and history, all artists who are associated with our collaboration are unpaid and have been motived and dedicated since day one with new interested artists everyday. I've been researching ways to license this collaboration as a business but find it hard as we have no source of revenue and haven't ran the film and animation festival circuit due to unfinished production so we have no source material. 

I am still researching grants from the federal government and figuring out if maritime associations will fund our interest. All of our speculation artists work in their own environment, which means we do not have a fully operation studio - which someday I hope to land in East, Boston where McKay planned and built his ships. Due to overwhelming costs of render farm services (Our short 8 minute film will cost about $38,000 and take about 174 hours to render) I have discussed with the team that our dreams, goals, inventions, and goals could be halted - and I am deeply afraid that we will never be able to produce quality computer animation dedicated in Boston, MA. 

So my questions are how should we go about this with federal funding, private funding and fundraising? I know of a few sites through public fundraising but I believe it wouldn't be enough to cover the matching cost of National Endowment of the Arts: New Media.

Even if our short film was successful to pass the judges screening process and receive official selections, the money to establish a business would be very small and not enough to establish any sort of studio with payment. Then, venture capitalists came up but we have no business stock. And Finally, Investors - We don't even know where to look for those and I believe they only exist in Hollywood. We did try out for PepsiCo10 top Entrepreneurs but found out they are looking for physical ideas to bring money to PepsiCo.

So as a young aspiring filmmaker and goal driven entrepreneur, what are the steps I should take in raising money for our shorts films / features and establishing a future studio in East Boston while creating short films and future feature films for theaters?

I believe in the future that we would be a competing film company against Pixar Animation Studios, they've held number one for too long! ;)

Thanks a lot for taking the time to read this.

I would post a website to our collaboration site but didn't want to break the rules of linking in these posts. If you go to google you can search Flying Cloud Animation and a result should turn up in the first round.

Benjamin M

Flying Cloud Animation