StreetXSW

A week after launching the StreetXSW project on Kickstarter I am canceling the campaign. Despite a strong response, and getting featured by the Kickstarter staff, I realized very soon that the project was not doing what I had hoped. People loved the video and concept but where not clear on what exactly the campaign was for. Some people were also reacting negatively to the rewards.

I could try to address these issues by adding more rewards, modifying the video or the project description but I didn’t feel that would correct the underlying problem of the campaign. I was trying to use Kickstarter to help me finish a project that still needed a lot of work.  

Ideally I should have launched a few months ago in order to get the project off the ground or I could have launched at the end to help finish the project. Launching in the middle created confusion and the project failed to get the traction it needed. 

StreetXSW is not dead

Through this experience I realized that I have to take the project a lot further before launching on Kickstarter. So I will continue to work on this on my own and relaunch sometime in the summer. I plan to go to SXSW, shoot the festival and create something very special from the images I capture.

Obviously this is a bit disappointing but I’m very motivated to do this project and make it the best I possibly can. The good news is that it gives me the opportunity to do some of the things I didn’t get to do the first time round, like updating this site more frequently.

I hope you follow along because I think something special will come out of all of this.

Nelson

As part of this project I was hoping to update the site a lot more. I wanted to share my thoughts about creating a Kickstarter project and being an artist in the digital age. Unfortunately this project took a lot more time than I anticipated and as you can see I wasn’t able to update the site. I still may share my thoughts at a later date once this project is a little farther along.

Well anyway, StreetXSW is live on Kickstarter. I hope you check it out, let me know what you think, and share with anyone you think would like it.

In March of 2011 I attended SXSW for the first time. Being someone one who is big into technology and the internet, I had heard a lot about the Interactive portion of the festival. I was very excited to attend as a speaker for the #140 Character Conference Panel.

It was truly an amazing experience. Everywhere I turned there are incredibly bright and interesting people. From Guy Kawasaki, to Gary Vaynerchuk, to Tim Ferriss, you never knew who you were going to run into. Imagine running into all the “rock stars” of your industry in a couple days. However, it wasn’t just the tech celebrities that made the event. It was all the wonderful conversations that I had with people from all over the world.

While I was attending I ran into a good friend who is a professional photographer. I noticed that he was shooting with a Leica M9. I had heard about these amazing cameras from a documentary film about street photography by Chris Weeks. Ever since watching the film I was very curious to see one up close. If you don’t know anything about Leicas, they are very expensive so I honestly did not expect to run into one anytime soon.

Noticing my interest in the camera, my friend asked if I would like to shoot with it for a while. He explained that he was there to work and would not have time to use it. I think my jaw hit the floor. Yes! I was dying to see what this camera could do.

With the M9 in hand I set out to shoot the rest of the festival. One thing I noticed was that even though the camera was digital it operated like a film camera. I got my start in photography with film, so the M9 forced me back into film mode. After shaking off some mental cobwebs I was right back to my old habits.

Starting out I got some decent results and decided to try my hand at street photography. After all, this genre is what the camera is famous for. The result was amazing, to me at least. I was able to capture some great moments and the small size of the camera made me almost invisible. It was so easy to use and I didn’t even have to worry about messing up exposures. At one point I even turned off the monitor and shot like it was film.

Once I had some free time, I was able to edit and take in the images I had captured. From these images two things became very clear. I wanted to shoot with this camera again, and there was such an interesting group of people attending this festival. It was from this desire to shoot SXSW again the idea for StreetXSW was born. 

I knew that shooting with a Leica and returning to SXSW would be a costly endeavor, but I thought it might be a great project for Kickstarter.com. In the fall of 2010 I completed funding for a documentary film and I realized what an amazing platform it is for creative types such as myself. During my first campaign I made a lot of mistakes and assumptions about Kickstarter that almost cost me the project. This time I was determined learn from my mistakes and make the best project I could.

Over the summer I wrote an e-book about how to get a creative project successfully funded on Kickstarter. I wrote about the mistakes I had made and interviewed other Kickstarters to see what they had done to make their projects successful. The result was a 73 page manifesto which has some powerful ideas about the way the site works.

Now armed with months of research and ideas about what makes Kickstarter tick, I am setting out to make the best project I can. I’m trying to see what happens when I apply all the lessons learned to a project that I am so very interested in doing. Over the coming months I will be talking more about the project and what it means to be an artist in the digital age. I hope that you follow along and enjoy the ride.