Crowdfunding Strategy That Actually Works with Emily Best

Hello and welcome to On production. I'm Cameron Woodward, and today we're talking with Emily Best, the founder and CEO of Seed and Spark. Emily has made a massive impact in how independent films get financed and distributed, boasting one of the highest crowdfunding success rates in the industry. But beyond that, she's a producer, an innovator and educator who's helped thousands of filmmakers build their audiences and careers. Today, we're going to get into how she started out, how Seed and Spark has evolved, and what it means for the future of production. So let's jump right in. Emily, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. I dug into your past a little bit, and I found that you studied anthropology, that you've managed restaurants that you fell into producing after seeing gaps in women's roles on stage when you lived in New York City. What are the defining or is there a defining moment that convinced you that film and then later seed and spark was a way to make an impact?

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1:19  

I'm 16 years old, and there's this really cool I'm a junior in high school, and there's this really cool girl on my soccer team who's a sophomore Amber. And Amber was like, We gotta go see this movie at the tower theater. And the tower theater is the only independent movie theater in Sacramento, California, where I was in high school. And yes, it was related to the old Tower Records rip. And I didn't know anything about the movie. I would just do whatever Amber thought would be cool to do. And I showed up, and it was the first time I had been to a movie at the tower theater, and it was an Iranian film by Makhmalbaf called Gabbeh. And I'd never, I don't know that I had ever watched a movie with subtitles before, other than in our high school, we had a high school anthropology class also. And I watched this film, and the credits started rolling, and I couldn't get out of my seat. I didn't know what I had just watched. I just knew that I was like completely full of feelings, and I would never quite be the same. And I think about that movie at least twice a month, and it's been, I don't know, a lot of years, 30 years, and so I think that was the first time I had a real sense of it. I'd like to say that turned me into, like, a really hip film nerd, but that's really not the case. I had a lot of interesting experiences with film after that. When I got into theater, I felt very in control of the elements because I had already been running restaurants for a while. So almost as soon as I got into theater, I found myself producing, although I didn't know that's what it was. I was just like so used to being like, Oh, look, here's a big group of people that all have conflicting priorities. Let me help organize them to sail in the right direction together. So it was, it felt in some ways very natural based on my work experience. And then, you know what happens when you demonstrate that you have any aptitude as a producer? Is people come to you with stuff which is super cool. And I helped co found a theater company, and we did this play in New York in 2010 um, 10. That was a site specific production of het a gabbler, which is not particularly important, except that het a gabbler, if you don't know, is the play that is like Hamlet for women. It's like every woman of a certain age kind of flirts with playing this part at some point, it's been played by many of the most famous actresses in the world. Anyway, Caitlin FitzGerald was the actor who was playing it for us, and I got a window into a really profound cognitive dissonance, which was at night she was coming to the theater and she was playing Hedda MF and gabbler, and during the day, she was constantly going to auditions for roles of nameless women, pretty, best friend, hot, best friend, sexy, best friend, like, over and over and over. And it was relentless. And just the contrast was so infuriating to like, witness that, and the fact that it's like, yeah, there's a lot of seminal roles for men on stage. There are many fewer for women. And so we, you know, got drunk after the show one night, and the group of us were like, we should, we should make a movie about women and women's that centers women like and at that time, Caitlin had been cast as pretty fiance in in an ED burns movie called newlyweds, and he was shooting this movie on a Canon 5d camera, which had only recently gotten a full frame sensor. Right? So digital cinema was all of a sudden, available, but he was the first kind of big name filmmaker who was going to use it to make a theatrically released film. And so she invited me to set one day where it was Ed burns behind the camera. Caitlin was like, you know, in a two shot with another actress, there was a the cinematographer with this tiny camera and a guy with a boom, and that was it. That was it. And Caitlin was like, see, we can make a movie. It's so easy. And that was the lie that changed my life, because then we tried to, we did. We made a movie. It was called like the water. We made a movie about women's friendships. We made a movie that could categorically not be shot on the 5d camera, because it was still very limited in what it could capture. And we were gonna shoot sweeping landscapes in Maine in the summer. So all of a sudden, I was producing something. You know, I was producing a feature film. The first time I ever produced a film. I don't recommend that for first timers. I was very lucky to have, like, an incredible group of people around me who could sort of walk me through the processes. But one of the most frustrating ones was in the deal making and going to sales agents and distributors and having them say things to my face, like, there's just not a market for women friendship movies, but if you could put some lesbian erotica in it, we could sell it, and I don't have to tell any creator who's tried to do deals ever that there's nothing worse than getting a creative note from somebody who doesn't really actually know anything about your movie that is based on what their perception of what the market wants. And so I was just aware of just how many cognitive biases were at work in the gatekeeping space, and I didn't want any part of it. And so we were having trouble raising the last bit of money to go make our production. And there were these new platforms called Kickstarter and Indiegogo that were popularizing this process of crowdfunding as like an online resource, and that sounded really cool, but at that time in my life, I would have called none of the grown ups that I knew. So, like, I don't know, my parents and their friends had heard of those platforms, and we were, like, a little bit uncomfortable with the idea of just like, asking for a pile of money to go shoot in Maine in the summer. And so instead, we built a, basically a wedding registry into a little WordPress website, and we listed every individual budget item that we needed that we thought people could identify with. So there were, like movie things, like cameras and, you know, those sorts of rentals. But there were also very practical things like food and makeup and bug spray and sunscreen and things that we knew, people could understand why we might need them. And we sent this list to everybody we knew, and we used Facebook's note fun. Remember when Facebook had a sub stack? That was a long time ago, and 450 some odd people contributed to that campaign, which is bonkers by any crowdfunding capacity. But what was interesting is, like most of the contributions didn't come in cash, although we more than hit our $20,000 goal. We raised 22,000 in cash, but literally hundreds of 1000s of dollars in loans and gifts of locations and goods and services.

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8:18  

Wow. So you mentioned Emily two crowdfunding platforms I think that are still relevant today, Kickstarter and Indiegogo, very much, though, seed and spark stands out in that it's very focused on filmmakers. It has maybe you can explain, like, an 80% rule and wish list approach, and I think you were sort of just digging into the origins of that story just a moment ago, with that, you know, what are the biggest misconceptions about crowdfunding for filmmakers, and then how do you address it? Yeah,

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8:48  

well, what we learned is that crowdfunding is a lot easier if people understand exactly how they can contribute, and you can get a lot more money the more you are in collaboration with your audience. So the biggest misconception about crowdfunding is that it's putting a hat out in this town square and like hoping that somebody throws money in it, crowdfunding is a very strategic relationship building with your audience that helps you build a really deep connection with them, and they a really deep connection with you and your project that can actually sustain you throughout so it wasn't just that they contributed money and stuff, it's that they showed up in droves to screenings we had all over the world, and brought their friends and all of a sudden those sales agents who were like, if you could put some lesbian rook and it were writing US offers, right? And so I think the biggest misconception, actually also is that crowdfunding is mostly about the funding. It's not, it's about the crowd, and that's what we would learn. And we would learn that once we built a relationship with the crowd, the power was much more in our hands to decide what could happen next.

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9:59  

That. That is a really interesting insight from doing this now for a number of years, enabling and empowering a lot of filmmakers the platform. What are unique challenges that you see first time filmmakers facing second time, like maybe seasoned filmmakers making and how you think they can overcome them?

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10:21  

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, if you're just starting out and you haven't done any audience building before, there's really quite a lot of work that needs to go in prior to the campaign, in starting to establish a relationship with your audience, and I say your audience, and not your friends and family, because if, if you're starting with just the core of your friends and family, then you need to spend a little while going out and cultivating a relationship with people who are in relationship with you because of what you're making. And that means you have to be really creative about are there other formats that are easier to get to market? Are you building some social presence, or you're doing live events, or just things that where you can actually start to engage with people as a creator with an audience that gets them to be excited about what you're making. I think that it's a it's a big mistake to launch a crowdfunding campaign without proving that you can get, effectively a total stranger, to at least sign up for a mailing list or a social media account based on your merit as an artist, as opposed to the fact that they already know you. That's not saying you don't want to have a strategy for cultivating your friends and family, but like the vast majority of us, do not live in communities where just our friends and family contributing could sustain a long term filmmaking career, right? Those are called Nepo babies, and we love them, and good for them. That's very nice. Or Nepo babies, I don't know how you're supposed to say it, but for the rest of us, it is really about leveraging crowdfunding, both what happens before, in cultivating a relationship with audience during where you're actually getting them so excited that they are ready to exchange money in advance of the project getting made and in exchange for incentives that excite them to afterwards when you deliver those incentives. I just got an email from somebody who contributed to I did a crowdfunding campaign for my feature documentary this summer, and she just got the poster in the mail. And I just got, like the sweetest, most thoughtful, excited email, and she's gonna put this poster on her wall, and is really thrilled about we. Part of our incentives were the documentaries about the Equal Rights Amendment, and there was a whole campaign organized in Virginia called artists for era. And so these incredible artists made these beautiful posters, and we were able to offer some as incentives, and so people who maybe, and this is a Canadian person, who actually doesn't have a stake in the era, for better or for worse, but cares a lot about women's issues globally and also really cares about art. And so I was able to cultivate an audience member who's maybe not an obvious audience member, just through even the incentives that we're offering, and draw her into the story through another angle. So it's really about thinking about, how does your story help connect communities? Right? Help connect people in different ways, ways that you might not have considered at first, and generally speaking, that builds a much larger potential audience that then you can leverage when it comes to festivals and distribution. It builds tremendous momentum. But so after the campaign is done, you deliver those incentives, you make a great film, you deliver it to those audiences. They tell all their friends, and then the next time you need to fundraise, you have a much larger circle to draw from. So as you get more and more of this experience, and you sort of build concentric circles each time you crowdfund, it gets easier in some ways, in that there's many, many more people that you're talking to, and harder in some ways, in that you have to really be thoughtful about how to maintain those relationships with a growing audience. And you know, a lot of filmmakers will say, like, I don't think that's my job. And I'm like, Okay, well, look, if you want to build a sustainable career that you control it 1,000% is your job. It's

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14:19  

an interesting phenomena, right? Is like, even if you look at the massive, large studio film, do you think that those world famous actors love spending 12 hours a day in press junkets, or do you think that they're connecting the story that they are in to the audiences that are willing to pay and to consume them, to be attached to them? Look,

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14:38  

there's always work we don't love to do. I would, I did not think getting into entertainment that, like 89% of my work would be laptoping, like I laptop for a living, right? But the whatever 11% that allows me to tell the stories that I care about. Teach the workshops that I care about, connect communities that I care about. It's worth it. That's

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15:04  

really interesting, and what an interesting way to articulate it. You know, I think there's some really deep wisdom there, like I had always sort of thought, man, it's so unfortunate. How many stories there are of people going to film school, raising money from friends and family, and it's always some unbelievably large amount of money that would impact your localized community, like 60, 70, 80,000 $100,000 $200,000 we're talking about a home. And then you realize that the vision that you have as a first time or early filmmaker that that is not nearly enough resources to execute the vision, and then you're out of the film business, and your family's sort of like, well, what was that for? And maybe you do have amazing stories to tell, but like, you never get over that hump again, because so much of a career success is about early velocity and momentum that's built, and I think that's such an interesting way that you've articulated it about like trying to find an audience connected to your story, rather than to yourself as an artist that's really, really interesting and wise. And you were just mentioning, Emily that you do workshops. I'm gonna get to that in a moment. But before we do on seed and spark, I mean, you've been, you know, really leading this platform and this movement around independent film, for quite a while, you have done some various pivots. The world has changed multiple times since you started. Can you give us a picture of seed and spark today? Lessons you've learned along the way, how filmmakers should think about engaging with seed and spark if they do have a story that they want to bring into the world and they want to work with seed and spark to make that happen, I

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16:46  

think I bought into some of the early big tech about vertical integration being the thing and you want to be the destination. But I am inherently a collaborator. I am not a lone genius as big tech would have you believe exists. And what I learned very quickly is that for seed and spark to have this sort of big level infrastructure building impact, we needed to be a nexus point, even more than we are a platform. So I view the crowdfunding platform as one element of much larger infrastructure that we have been building that is community, education, resourcing, and then also distribution, and the distribution is where we've had the most pivots over the last 12 years. I mean, in part, just because the market has been wild. But so like the vast majority of where we spend our well, we don't spend any marketing money in the traditional sense. We go out into communities and we teach workshops, and those workshops are about teaching creators how to leverage the tools of crowdfunding to build these long, truly independent, sustainable careers, because part of what I believe is the infrastructure that we need has to be in the behaviors of our whole community, right? That's part of the infrastructure is like a shared set of behaviors of how do we understand the importance of cultivating audiences, caring for them, connecting with our local film offices, film schools, theaters, film festivals, etc, as a part of our own career building, because that actually enriches the whole community. So we have relationships with film schools and theaters and festivals, and that's where we go and teach our workshops, is in collaboration with people who are already building and resourcing communities all across the country. We teach, I don't know, 150 live workshops a year. And then we organize our own conferences called Creative sustainability summits. We have one coming up April 28 at the Atlanta Film Festival and and that's really about like sort of intense community building and and resourcing the crowdfunding platform. Like we, I think, have cracked the code a little bit on crowdfunding for storytellers. We have a very time tested process at this point. It's over 12 years now that we have been using this process, we have an 83% campaign success rate. Or, I should say, the creators on our platform have an 83% campaign success rate. It's the highest in the world of any crap crowdfunding platform in any category. Why is that? Well, three things. One, we educate them before they come in, and so they know what they need to do in advance of the campaign. We have a real live human that reviews every single campaign to ensure that they are set up for success. And then we have built in a lot of incentives for folks to focus on audience building, even beyond crowd building, so the more audience members you get. You can unlock rewards from other platforms and other tools. And then recently, as in, last week, we announced a partnership with Kinema, which is really community based distribution, and so we can connect the momentum of crowdfunding directly through to distribution. And then we launched another company in the enterprise learning space that curates the best films from around the world and sells them into corporations to replace their like boring, corporate training that's called film forward. So we're constantly trying to innovate in the distribution space, to find new ways, new tools, new pathways for creators to garner revenue that isn't so marginal as to be insulting. Like, I don't, I'm not interested. Once we used to pipe films into Amazon and all those things, and once I realized they were getting paid, you know, point 0.0004, cents per hour streamed, I was like, I don't. This is a ridiculous, preposterous I like, unless I can get you two to $3 per stream, like, I don't want to talk about it, right? That's what they can do on Kinema. That's what we can do with foam forward. And so we're interested in infrastructure that's actually meaningful to our creators and doesn't require them to build such economies of scale, right? Like, in order to be successful on Amazon, you need millions, and it's like the Spotify model, right? Like, it's cool to get on Spotify, but like, you're never gonna make any money there. And I don't want creators to have to set up an expectation of having to build an economy of scale of millions. I want them to be able to make money on an economy of scale, of 1000s. I think

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21:42  

that's really awesome. Focused onto this, like, 1000 true fans idea that's been popularized, right? Especially, especially powerful for, like, a filmmaker that wants to, like, get some of those early wins and then catapult your career. That makes a lot of sense. That's awesome, in your view. Emily, what still needs to change in the production pipeline, from pitching to distribution to ensure not just inclusion, but like, more voices, more access, more interesting stories, a more diverse marketplace of storytellers and ideas that move civilization forward. I'm

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22:21  

going to start with things that creators can control, and then there's a few things that I would just like to have happen, and I'll just put them out into the universe. In terms of what creators can control. It is about building a real practice, just like you would build a writing practice or habit, just like you would build a writers group to create accountability. You want to create accountability around audience building, and you just want to have a little practice for cultivating your audience. And that can be, I can look a lot of different ways. It does not mean you have to become a social media sensation. You can build up a mailing list. You can create events. You can go teach workshops about things. You know, there are lots and lots of ways to cultivate you can make little micro things and show them to people, right? You can make a bunch of shorts and tour them at festivals. There's a ton of different ways to really engage with your audience. But then if you do show up in front of your audience, make it worth their while. Make sure you follow up, stay in relation to them. That's really what will give you that sort of ongoing growth. So that's one thing that creators can control. I think the second thing is to really be strategic. So you mentioned before raising a little bit of money, but not scaling your idea to match that piece of money. I mean, I think we see this so often in early and mid career filmmakers is that they've got their script for their ten million movie, but they're gonna try to force it when they raise $100,000 which is, by the way, like a ton of money, as you mentioned. And that is a recipe for disaster. It feels terrible. It doesn't come out the way you want. It doesn't match your taste. I really encourage creators to look make small things and and I got this from Mar du place, who we've, we've done a lot of work with, he always says, like, rewrite the thing inside the amount of money raised, so that that amount of money feels luxurious, where you have time and space and experimentation, and it feels delicious. That is where you will get your best work, and it will bring everybody up you can build. Please write contracts, oh, my God, for everything you make. Make sure everybody has signed an agreement about what is expected of them and what is expected of you, and follow through on both pay your bills, right? I mean, you were talking about how Wrapbook is, in part, designed to make sure that people are behaving ethically vis a vis the people they hire on their films. And my God, that's a good piece of advice. Do right by the people. I had

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24:55  

the opportunity to have a very long conversation with a great entertainment lawyer named Mark. Litwak, who has been in the space a long time, whose own son is an independent filmmaker and just a mountain of insight, of making sure that you're doing contracts, not only so that you, like, can secure a great career future for yourself, but that you have good relationships with anybody that ultimately does distribute your film. Like, just make it clean, do it right, we and then, yeah, totally. Like, I think between seed and spark and Wrapbook, we have a ton of resources for filmmakers to explore those types of things when they're in that stage. But, yeah, huge,

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25:34  

if I can speak a few things into the universe. Number one is that, you know, we released, in collaboration with Kinema, we released the distribution playbook last year, and that is an online and evergreen and constantly updated resource that helps creators build distribution strategies. Creators need to be strategic about how they are distributing based on their goals. If your goals are impact, your distribution strategy is going to look different than if your goals are just money, and there can be blended goals all the time, right? Or, or viewership, or I want to get an agent, or I want to win an Oscar, like, your distribution strategies are going to look different based on those goals. And I feel like too often, what you get in an in a like little investor packet is like, we're gonna go to Sundance and we're gonna sell for millions, and that happens to like, six films a year. And mostly we knew that was gonna happen in advance, right? Like, very rarely, a surprise. So I would say, you know, being really strategic about distribution from jump, and being really involved in that and informing yourself about how that gets done. And then I would really like to see some more established Hollywood creators starting to use these new models and new infrastructure. We have a kind of exciting announcement that I don't know when this podcast will be out, but maybe we'll be out by then. And that's really part of what we're trying to cultivate. Is infrastructure that we need some leaders. We need some folks who people look up to and follow and are excited about who just taking advantage of the Hollywood relationships they have, but actually using that platform and privilege to help build and grow new infrastructure that benefits many more people outside of Hollywood.

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27:16  

Super interesting, Emily, you had mentioned just a moment ago that you have pivoted a few times within distribution, different partnerships, different ideas have emerged because the world has changed a few different times. And then you also mentioned using films as corporate trading tools through film forward. How did that idea come about? And what impact are you seeing so far?

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27:39  

Oh my gosh, yeah. In 2018 we had had a subscription product live on seed and spark for a couple of years, and I remember we were doing a product sprint and trying to figure out, how do you like, create a need, or like, sort of like, engender the need in the audience to subscribe to us when you have all these other platforms now, because, like, we launched in 2016 and by 2018 like every studio had gone into the streaming space, and all of a sudden we were exclusively competing with Bucha billion dollar companies. And I remember realizing like, Oh, if your actual value is, like, diverse content, and it's not celebrity driven. There is it's really hard to find a single hook. You have to spend a ton of money because you actually the way that the algorithms work in advertising is by tiny, micro genre of person, right, whether it's demographic or whatever, and if you're trying to actually leverage films for what most of these creators are making them for, which is not just shouting into an echo chamber, but building bridges across divides, all of social media and streaming is not built for that. Everything that creators make, when it goes into social media and streaming, is delivered via an algorithm, primarily to people who already look like them and already think like them. And our creators basically came to us and we're like, this is not why we make work. And so I remember being in this product sprint and kind of confronting this problem, and my stomach dropped out because I was like, Oh, I see. What is being asked of us is, how do we deliver films to audiences at scale who don't identify as the audience for those films without using social media or streaming? How do you do that? And I just remember thinking, well, this is a wicked problem, and I don't even know where to begin to begin to untangle it, so I went to all the smartest people I knew, and my friend and mentor, Wendy Smith, said, Did you know The workplace is the most diverse place most people are in their lives. Do you figure out a strategy for delivering films into the workplace you would just naturally get in front of audiences that no algorithm would ever put together? Right? Right? Yeah, and that was the beginning of it. And we did a whole bunch of research, and what we learned is that, like people who work in learning and develop, corporate learning and development, they are also trying to do what filmmakers are trying to do, but to different vectors. So filmmakers are trying to use films as a vector for cultural transformation. People who work in learning and development, Chief People officers, whatever they're they're trying to use the workplace as a vector for social progress, cultural transformation, et cetera. And so they actually had very aligned goals, if very different approaches. And everybody in corporate L and D who we interviewed, we interviewed about 350 folks before we launched. It basically said corporate training videos are terrible. Everybody agrees. Nobody likes them, and yet that is the modality that, like the vast majority of our work, is being delivered by, and we would love something better. And we all know that story based learning is 22 times stickier than traditional tell and test or, you know, PowerPoint and and multiple choice methods. And so we thought there was really a there, there, and we started developing that, and it is a modality. We exclusively license short films. We build curriculum around them that is replicable, meaning it's not custom curriculum. We're selling them into multiple organizations, and then we pay royalties based on those contracts at the rate of like, yeah, two to $3 per individual view of a film, as opposed to 0.0004, cents per hour streamed.

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31:33  

That's really powerful, going back to seed and spark. I mean, I'm really curious, because you were talking to so many filmmakers, you are at this interesting intersection of tech and distribution and storytelling. What sort of emerging trends do you see shaping the future of production right now?

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31:53  

Yeah, the business model is really hairy right now. Obviously we wouldn't be podcasting in 2025 if we didn't say the words AI, I think the technology transformation is one of the strongest and most intense, and it's also really fraught, because so many creators feel like they cannot engage with AI ethically. And I think that's an extremely legitimate point of view. And I think they also conflictingly, often feel like they don't want to be left behind. And so I think formulating ethical models for making work efficiently, effectively, rapidly, responding to this time. I think the political environment is massively going to shape storytelling as large institutions feel the pressure of autocratic rule and kind of start to fall in line as they seem to be, it's the creators who are going to be making the bold choices, but it means they're not going to be able to make those bold choices inside the sort of traditional pathways. And so I think this is going to be a time of tremendous innovation and also upheaval. And I think the fact that, like the kids going to film school today have had a cell phone that shoots 4k video for most of their lives. It means that we're, we're moving into a time with, like, tremendous facility, with the tools and a lot more availability. So like, I actually think we could, we could be headed for a tremendous cultural renaissance, if it is not summarily squashed by the fact that we have reversed the Paramount consent decrees, and we've made it possible to, like, completely consolidate the entertainment business. So like, I just hope that the entertainment corporations don't drive the whole business off a cliff in an effort to save themselves and their shareholders, because they have completely in big Tech's rule book, forgotten who actually makes them their money. And I think that's going to be an ongoing battle.

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34:13  

That's a really fascinating subject. I want to ask a sort of a unique question, which is a question about a question to wrap this up here, because, you know, you've done a lot of interviews, you give a lot to the industry, people will have, you know, asked you questions to elicit insights about the process of benefit filmmaking for years and but, and also about a lot of other subjects. But is there a question you wish more people would ask you, something that reveals maybe a deeper side of your work or vision.

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34:43  

Something that often gets said about us is that we are democratizing the film space, or that's what's been said about seed and spark. It's what's been said about the distribution playbook. It's what's been said about a lot of our partnerships, democratizing education or film education, whatever you. And I wish more people interrogated what they meant when they said that, because building a tool does not make democracy, building voting rights does not make democracy, using voting rights and leveraging collective power makes a democracy right. And so when I say to filmmakers who get really excited about the concept of like, democratized filmmaking, like, what does that mean to you? I really want them to say, Oh, I understand it as these are things that are available to me, to work with everybody in my space, to build collective power, collective infrastructure, right, to do the things that I really want to do, which is, like, build an independent, sustainable career telling the stories that matter most to me and my communities, and not see that as competitive to everybody else, trying to do the same thing, but collaborative with Yeah, I want us to really ask, What do you mean when you get excited about, oh, they're democratizing this or, like, that's a that's a tool that's going to solve this problem, who's actually solving what problem, right? Because, like, I think crowdfunding, a crowdfunding platform, is an amazing example. Like, we have built a really great method. It doesn't mean anything if nobody uses it, but the fact of its existence is unnecessary impact, unless people are willing to use it. And we're very lucky over the years that even as we were struggling many years ago to sort of catch up technologically with our peers, because we have received literally, like 1/100 of the funding that the other crowdfunding platforms make, maybe less than the other crowdfunding platforms have received. They stayed with us and they grew with us because they understood that we were onto something bigger. And so I also think that we're an example of what can be true and what we can grow if you are willing to invest in the things that like, align with you ethically, and align with your vision of the future, and align with a healthy, thriving industry, as opposed to just doing the thing that feels like it's the thing that's supposed to be done.

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37:15  

Emily best, thank you so much for joining me on production, sharing some awesome insights. Yeah, really looking forward to seeing all of the incredible things that you and your team continue to do for the independent film community and communities all around, I think, even the world to tell stories and and, you know, really engage with what it means to be a person. Thanks. Thanks. Cameron