UPDATE:
We're Indie Reign's Project of the Week! Thanks for all your votes!
We were also featured as an Indie WIRE Project of the Day.
THANK YOU TO OUR 118 FUNDERS! You've pushed us over our stretch goal of $10,000!
We will continue to donate 5% of any funds raised above our initial goal of $7500 to Postpartum Support International (www.postpartum.net)
"The Goblin
Baby" is a short film by me -- Shoshana Rosenbaum. For most of my life, I
have been a writer and photographer interested in visual storytelling. This
will be my first film.
I am the mother of
three young children (ages 8, 5, and 2). The first year of motherhood was a
serious life shift for me, as I think it is for most parents. I adored my baby,
but I was also sleep-deprived, negotiating new terrain with my husband, and trying
to figure out the right balance of work, artistic expression and parenting.
One night, I was doing
the dishes, alone in the old house we were renting. The baby was sleeping
upstairs. I glanced at the baby monitor and thought: what if I heard some
crazy, supernatural sound come out of it? What would I do?
That moment was the kernel of "The Goblin Baby."
I've always been
fascinated with the idea of changelings -- the idea that appears in folklore
when mothers believe their babies have been stolen by goblins or fairies and
replaced with creatures that resemble their babies but that are different.
I believe in a
mother's intuition -- that your gut tells you what you need to know
about your child, especially with a baby, who can't talk. I found the idea
compelling -- what if a mother knew the baby in front of her wasn't her child,
but everyone around her thought she was crazy? In our modern age, how would a
diagnosis of post-partum depression play in to this?
I wrote "The
Goblin Baby" to explore these ideas, structuring it so that I could shoot
it in my house and the surrounding neighborhood. I live in a part of
Washington, D.C. with a lot of old houses and spooky pockets of woods, so it is the
perfect setting for my story.
What
We Need & What You Get
We need $7500 to make
our film. That covers our paid crew -- cinematographer, lighting and sound. It
pays SAG day rates for our actors, and feeds the whole team during our 5 day
shoot. The money we raise
will also be used for sound design and festival admission fees. Many of us
-- including the producers, director and assistant director, and composers --
are volunteering our time because we believe in this story and this
project.
We are offering some
perks to encourage you to help us make this film. These include exclusive updates from the production, a
link to watch the film before anyone else, a thank-you in the credits, a
limited-edition "Goblins Aren't Real" or "I Believe in
Goblins" sticker, an invitation to the friends-and-family D.C. premiere,
and even the title of Executive Producer on our IMBD page and in the film's credits.
The
Impact
We need more women's
voices, and women's stories, in film. In the top 250 films of 2012, only 9% of the directors and 15% of the screenwriters were women. In the top 500 films of the last 5 years, only 30.8% of the speaking characters were women. (https://www.nyfa.edu/film-school-blog/gender-inequality-in-film/). At
the 2013 DC Shorts Film Festival Screenplay Competition, I was one of 6
screenwriting finalists - and the only woman.
Whenever someone reads
this script, or hears it performed (as at DC Shorts), we hear things
like: "This is a great story. I want to see it as a movie." "I've never come across anything that captures the feel
of that first year with a baby the way this does."
Independent filmmakers
need support to bring their visions to the screen. Support the kinds of movies
that you want to see through your financial contributions (ideally, the price
of a movie ticket or better), and you will not be disappointed with the results.
Other Ways You Can Help
We understand if you
can't contribute money to our campaign. Can you tell your friends about it, and
share the link? Post it on your Facebook page?Indiegogo makes it easy with the "Share" tools on this
page.Tweet about it? We would be eternally grateful!
