I know Talk is cheap. Action what has value. And Actions
speak louder than words. That’s why I’m planning to do a Kickstarter to finance
the production of a 20-minute All About Nikki Pilot.
Readers have heard me say for years that one of my goals for
the next five years was to create a Pilot episode for the All About Nikki TV
show. The scripts have been popular all over the world with readers, and the All
About Nikki screenplay books have sold consistently ever since I published them
in 2011. So there’s clearly an audience for an All About Nikki sitcom.
The episode I want to produce is from All About Nikki
Episode 1.01- “All About The Pilot”. This episode is available to readers who
downloaded All About Nikki-The Fabulous First Season.
If I can raise enough money and produce a pilot I plan on uploading it to YouTube and
Vimeo, to get feedback from viewers. If you like what you see I’ll try to raise
the money to produce more episodes.
But in order to produce that pilot I need money. I don’t
know how much it costs to produce a TV pilot, but I know I’m gonna need a lot
of money to buy cameras, get permits, and pay people for their time. That’s
right pay people. I want the production of an All About Nikki pilot to be a
paying job for all involved from the actors to the production crew. Too many
times a Black project is based on giving someone something for free.
And I know anything worth having is gonna cost. People who
work on a project have bills to pay, and they need to eat. Their time is
valuable. I want to use this project to bring jobs to the Black community and
put money in the hands of brothers and sistas. One TV pilot means hundreds of
jobs, and I want to get Black people working.
I’ll probably give something to all the people who kick in
to the kickstarter for the pilot like a signed paperback edition of All AboutNikki-The Fabulous First Season. There’s a lot of laughs in those 13 episodes
and believe once people read scripts for what they’ll be financing they’ll want
to see more.
If you are a fan of Classic Black sitcoms like The The Fresh
Prince of Bel-Air, Sister, Sister, Smart Guy, That’s So Raven and True Jackson
VP, jump on this All About Nikki fundraising campaign. We don’t need a network to put
quality programming on for young Brothers and sisters to watch. With the Internet,
it’s possible to produce reach an audience of viewers all over the world.
BEFORE you do all that check around to see if there are grants that you can get to film this pilot. There is a way you can do it without having to raise a ton of money.
ReplyDeleteIf you have time go to your local library and see if you can borrow the DVD Portlandia (now in season 4) the commentaries give some interesting tips on firming and how to budget (the first season cost less than $1 million to produce).
And I still say talk to some of those drama teachers a the school or college level-somebody needs a story to perform a play off of. Why not do it as a stage play first and get a dvd together to present and then use it to help get a real pilot done.
Is that what Tyler did with Madea? He had a finished play to show and eventually got funding for movie.
Anonymous:
ReplyDeleteYou've given me some ideas and some thiings I could research.
The Kickstarter is just one of several avenues I'm planning on purusuing for this project.
I'll get in touch with drama teachers, but I want to make sure I can get the foundations in place before I start building. I'm still tryiing to figure out licenses, permits, and all the other preliminary stuff works before I start working on a production.
I don't know if Nikki lends to a stage play, the scripts are about 20-25 pages long. It'd be a really short show. But maybe I could modify things.
Everything is in the rough planning stages, but I really want to get this project off the ground. No one is doing a Black teen sitcom and that is where the biggest audience is right now.