Kickstarter-Funded ‘Hair Love’ Wins Academy Award for Finest Animated Brief Movie — Kickstarter

Tonight the Kickstarter-funded brief Hair Love gained the Academy Award for Finest Animated Brief Movie. Hair Love is the third Kickstarted movie to take dwelling an Oscar, and 2020 marks the tenth consecutive 12 months {that a} Kickstarter-funded challenge has been nominated for an Academy Award.

Hair Love publicly started its journey in the summertime of 2017 as a Kickstarter marketing campaign by director and former NFL extensive receiver Matthew A. Cherry, who had beforehand used Kickstarter to fund his function movies 9 Rides (2016) and The Final Fall (2012). The inspirational brief follows an African-American father’s first try and do his daughter’s hair. The thought for the challenge got here from Matthew’s need to advertise hair love amongst younger folks of coloration, and to push again towards the absent black father stereotype and the shortage of black illustration in mainstream animated movies.

The challenge obtained sweeping nationwide consideration; by the tip of the marketing campaign in August 2017 4,981 backers had pledged $284,058 to efficiently fund the movie, nearly quadrupling Matthew’s authentic objective of $75,000 and breaking the file for Kickstarted animated shorts.

On the morning of the awards ceremony, Matthew wrote to his backers:

I simply needed to take the time this morning to thank every and everybody one among you for supporting and believing in Hair Love as early as you probably did. It doesn’t matter what occurs tonight we already gained and also you all are part of an Oscar nominated animated brief movie and a New York Instances Finest Promoting Image E book. Thanks once more on your assist.

Brief movies thrive on Kickstarter, with backers having pledged over $41 million to greater than 7,332 profitable shorts tasks since 2011. This 12 months, we’re calling on filmmakers to launch new brief movie campaigns this March as a part of our Lengthy Story Short initiative, the place we’re providing bespoke crowdfunding steering and that includes brief movie tasks on our platform all through the month so trade buddies in funding, programming, acquisitions, and distribution can observe tasks to find new expertise.

Seven out of 16 of the Kickstarter-funded Oscar nominations have been in one of many Academy’s brief movie classes. We imagine in filmmakers who begin small, however have massive imaginative and prescient and even larger ambitions for his or her challenge—and who need their neighborhood with them each step of the best way. With Lengthy Story Brief we’re hoping to provide much more shorts filmmakers a larger purpose to launch their challenge into the world with us.