http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1749250870/juneyoung-and-her-problems

A young Korean film student attempts to move away from her stagnant work and relationships to search for something.

‘Juneyoung and her problems’ is a feature-length MFA thesis film by Juhui Kwon.

It’s a story about a young Korean film student, Juneyoung. The film begins where Juneyoung wants to take a break from her long-time relationship with John, because she feels it is stagnant. She starts to realize that she has become increasingly dissatisfied and negating many things in her life such as work, relationships and life in general. Not only is she dissatisfied – her dissatisfaction itself worries her. Clearly, she is not happy about that and feels that she is trapped in her situations and and her state of her mind. So, it is her attempt to make some changes that shapes the progression of the film, ‘Juneyoung and her problems’.

The script is well-received by the professor and an acclaimed director, Chantal Akerman. And this feature-length thesis film has been successfully approved.

The producers are working on pre-production now. The film will be shot mostly in west harlem area, CCNY, a few apartments, a cafe, bodega and etc. Casting and crew recruiting are in process.

The reason we need to raise funding for a thesis project is because we are making a feature-length film that has a larger budget than a regular short thesis film project. For example, we need to feed the crew and cast for 13 days -not just four or five days. Also, since it is a feature-length film, there are many locations and some of the locations cost certain amount of money. Also, we need money for transporatation, mainly for moving lighting and film equipment from one place to another during 13 days of the feature-length film shooting period.

Then why don’t we just make a short film?

First of all, it will be much more challenging to make a feature after graduating from school – to be honest, it would be difficult enough to make even a short film. Second of all, the director and writer, Juhui made her first indie-feature last year and gained great experience and is fully ready to make her second feature -which will have more depth, fluency and better production quality than her first indie-feature. Juhui had planned to make a feature for her graduate thesis film even before she started the school. This will be the last kickstarter campaign that Juhui will probably hold for any fundraising. Please give her a chance to show what she has been prepared for the last few years.

Since we get to have all the film equipment and crew from the school, even though the film budget is $5000, the actual production value is more than $5000. This means the production quality of the film will be beyond $5000 indie-film.

Any amount of your support will be greatly appreciated and wisely and modestly used for the production of ‘Juneyoung and her problems’.

The majority of the money will be spent to feed the crew and the cast, who will work for free for the project. It will be 13 days of shooting, and approximately 10 or more people will be on the set each day. So, for the entire shooting period, we are likely to spend about $2000 or more for breakfast, lunch, snacks and drinks.

Then there’re locations. Luckily, we don’t need to pay for the school locations, however, we still need to give some compensations to a cafe, asian restaurant, music studio and apartment and even a holding space for the equipment. So, we will end up spending about $1000 or more for the locations. Locations with the right atmosphere is the only thing that we do not want to compromise, while we don’t mind compromising on a camera or other things.

We also need some budget for renting a van to move the film equipments (we might need to hire a driver, so far none of the crew can drive) and to purchase some production design items and little things such as batteries for the microphone. It will come out about $1000 or more.

Also, to store enormous amount of footages for a feature-length film safe, we need new hard drive, which will cost about $400.

Lastly, some percentage of the raised fund will be deducted by Amazon and Kickstarter, which I believe a few hundreds dollars.

If we can raise more than $5000, the extra money will be spent to compensate the main actress who will need to work on set for almost every days and maybe a cinematographer.

If you believe in variety in arts and cinema, please support this project. We know you won’t regret.

Thank you for your time and support.

Sincerely,

Production team of ‘Juneyoung and her problems’