THE INDIEGOGO CAMPAIGN HAS ENDED BUT YOU CAN STILL SUPPORT THE PROJECT - PLEASE GET IN TOUCH TO DONATE OR DISCUSS SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITIES.

A MASSIVE THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO HAS CONTRIBUTED SO FAR!

THE PROJECT

There are 94 naturally occurring elements, from Hydrogen to Plutonium, and together they make up everything in the world. The stories of the elements are the stories of our own lives, revealing the details of our personal lives, the patterns of our economies, and our relationships with our natural resources.

94 Elements is a new global filmmaking project, exploring our lives through the lens of the elements. The project is producing a collection of stories by different filmmakers about the endless ways the elements touch our daily lives. Each filmmaker takes one element as the basis for a film around how it's used. The films are surprising and moving human stories – this is not about science, but about our human relationships with our mineral resources.

THE FILMS

We've already produced new films with Sundance-winner Nino Kirtadze and BAFTA-winner Marc Isaacs, and have some fantastic filmmakers lined up to make the next ones. As well as producing new films with established filmmakers, we want to run a series of pitch competitions over the life of the project for the best new and emerging filmmakers to make films for the project.

As part of this campaign we're running at least 2 pitch competitions for talented filmmakers to win commissions and if you contribute $25 or more to the project you'll help to decide which films get made in all open pitches over the lifetime of the project!

THE DIGITAL PLATFORM

To accompany the films we want to create a dynamic digital platform for the project, exploring our complex relationships with our resources. Working with a top digital studio, the platform will combine live data such as commodity prices and Twitter streams for each element with interactive mapping and gameplay to create a unique set of interactive features and visualisations of our daily interactions with our mineral resources.

THE TEAM

We've got a dream team of industry professionals, developers, designers and advisors behind the project and the support of some great individuals and organisations.  Mike's credentials on delivering multi-year projects are top rate - his other multi-year project is following a team of particle physicists hunting the Higgs particle at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland, and Heidi's contact book read's like a who's who in documentary. Our major project partners are the D-Word, a network of over 9000 documentary professionals worldwide, and the Sheffield DocFest, one of the world's biggest documentary festivals, and we're supported by an army of motivated and influential people and organisations providing advice, contacts and support - everything is in place for an amazing project, all we need now is your support!

WHY 94 ELEMENTS?

We're doing this for 3 reasons:

1. It's a great idea!

2. We're passionate about documentary filmmaking and want to see fantastic new films by great filmmakers.

3. We want to focus attention on how we use and manage our resources through a playful, creative, multi-faceted project. We want to tell the backstories of all the stuff we use in our daily lives - Where does it come from? How is it used? How much is left? Through combining different perspectives and data the project will create a unique and intimate picture of our relationships with our resources in the 21st century.

THE FUTURE

This is a multi-year project and our aim is for it to grow and produce new films and digital features over a period of years - it's going to be a fascinating, inspiring journey!

HOW TO GET INVOLVED

Become a part of the project! There are 3 ways you can get involved:

1. Contribute to the campaign.  We've created some really special rewards for contributors and by getting involved you're going to be right at the heart of a truly unique project which will repay you many times over, we hope over a period of years.

2. If you're a talented filmmaker, pitch a film to the project - details on how to pitch you ideas for films are here.

3. We really hope you can do one or both of the above. Even if you don't, you can help us massively by spreading the word about the project and the campaign.  Please support the project via email, Facebook, Twitter, personal phone calls to all your contacts etc ;-), and please get in touch if you have any ideas about good places to feature the project - we'd love to hear from you!

You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook and subscribe to our mailing list here.

THE REWARDS!

We think that for being such amazing people and getting involved in the project you should get some really special rewards.  We've put together some fantastic and unique perks for you. We're incredibly lucky to have the award-winning Dutch design studio Catalogtree and master printmaker Kelvyn Smith create some unique works exclusively for this campaign - you can't find these anywhere else and they really deserve campaigns of their own - they're amazing!  Here's what you'll get:

Laser-etched, sustainably sourced, oak element cubes as seen in the trailer. Lovingly hand finished by project director Mike Paterson. They're beautiful!

3 screen-prints by award-winning Dutch design studio Catalogtree using homebrew inks created from the elements they represent! The ink in the sulfur print is made up with actual sulfur, the copper ink from copper etc.  Catalogtree specialise in data visualisation and the work uses a special geeky algorithm to pack all 94 circles, one for each element, inside one bigger circle as economical way as possible. Each element consists of radial lines related to its atomic number. Each screen print is A4 size approx.

Designed and created uniquely for the project by acclaimed letterpress printer Kelvyn Smith. Kelvyn has produced a typographically inspired take on the periodic table, exploring the type weights of different type and playing on the elements lead, tin and antimony, the 3 metals used to create the alloys for the type in letterpress printing. Printed on 280gsm BFK Rives 100% cotton paper.

The element lottery is going to be great fun - you will win a physical sample of one of the following 76 elements, sealed in glass ampoules under argon gas to preserve its appearance - you could hit gold! Literally!

The elements featuring in the element lottery are: Aluminium, Antimony, Argon, Arsenic, Barium, Beryllium, Bismuth, Boron, Bromine, Cadmium, Calcium, Carbon, Cerium, Chlorine, Chromium, Cobalt, Copper, Dysprosium, Erbium, Europium, Fluorine (as Calcium Fluoride), Gadolinium, Gallium, Germanium, Gold, Hafnium, Helium, Holmium, Hydrogen, Indium, Iodine, Iridium, Iron, Krypton, Lanthanum, Lead, Lutetium, Magnesium, Manganese, Mercury, Molybdenum, Neodymium, Neon, Nickel, Niobium, Nitrogen, Osmium, Oxygen, Palladium, Phosphorus, Platinum, Praseodymium, Rhenium, Rhodium, Ruthenium, Samarium, Scandium, Selenium, Silicon, Silver, Strontium, Sulfur, Tantalum, Tellurium, Terbium, Thallium, Thulium, Tin, Titanium, Tungsten, Vanadium, Xenon, Ytterbium, Yttrium, Zinc and Zirconium. 

WHERE THE FUNDING IS GOING

This campaign will make possible everything that will follow over the next few years with the project.  It will fund some great new films, develop the project's digital platform and open doors for new funding for more films and features.  It's going to be an incredible journey and we've created a campaign based around rewarding people with a stake in the project's direction over its entire lifetime.  

The more we can raise, the more films we can make - it's that simple!

The total of $62k will fund:

1) New films! Our goal is to finance at least 2 new films with this campaign (maybe yours if you're a filmmaker).

2) Digital platform. We have big plans for the digital side of the project to accompany the films. Check out the Mix Lab - it’s still in a Beta form and needs to be finished, and we have many beautiful things we want to do create on the digital front.

The $62k breaks down as follows.

NOTE: We have to fund things in the order listed below, so in the (hopefully highly unlikely!) event that we only raise $10k, we can only fund the pitch at the Sheffield DocFest.  If we raise $20k we can fund the Sheffield Pitch and the Crowdfunded pitch and so on.

1. $10k - A new film by a great filmmaker chosen by the audience at the Sheffield DocFest. $8k goes directly to the filmmaker, with the remainder paying for production costs and overheads.

2. $10k - A new film from the Crowdfunded Pitch - voted for by you, the Indigogo contributors.  If we can raise more funding we can run more pitches for you to vote on. 

3. $18k - Develop the digital platform - we have great plans..!

4. $10k - A new film by an award-winning filmmaker (It's a surprise! We have some great names lined-up...)

+ Campaign costs of $14k - Indiegogo/Paypal fees and costs of producing and shipping the rewards.