Crowdfund This: Multiplex 10 The Web Series Finishing Funds

AFA readers should be familiar with Multiplex 10, the webcomic turned animation from creator Gordon McAlpin. Following the conclusion of the long-running comic, the series made the jump to first an animated short and then an ongoing web series. As an independent animated project, made by McAlpin and a small team, it has been produced with help of its fans through crowdfunding.

Back in 2018, the team successfully raised the funds to create five episodes and five movie review episodes via Kickstarter. Having produced those episodes- and one extra long bonus review- they are now back with a new Indiegogo campaign to fund "(at least) one more episode". A sixth episode is in production, but they ran out of funds to complete it.

The series has been well received, winning plaudits including Best Animation/Puppetry at the 2018 Minnesota WebFest and Best Web Series at the 2018 Monmouth Film Festival.

"Why do we need more funding?" The campaign page explains: "Well… we got ambitious. Where the first series averaged under 2 minutes each (six episodes and 11 minutes, 11 seconds total), and we’d budgeted the Kickstarter project on episodes of that length. But then the first four episodes of Series 2 averaged nearly 3 1/2 minutes each (just over 13 minutes total), and because we barely made it over the goal, we didn’t have a buffer."

The next episode is storyboarded and written, but the funds raised will help the episode be produced much quicker. "We’ve tried to self-finance the rest of this episode, but the amount of time we need to finish the episode is just long enough that it isn’t easy to carve out: roughly two weeks of full-time work, because it’s a roughly two-minute video."

The goal is $2500, but the plan is to create an additional two minutes of animation for every $2500 that may be raised over the goal. "We can’t promise how many episodes that will work out to—we’ve learned our lesson about promising a fixed number of episodes rather than basing it on running time!"  These extra minutes could go towards full episodes or movie reviews or both.

Head over to check out the project page now.