Northwest Film Forum

UPDATE!! We're so close to our goal, and with Hetero releasing June 10th, we're looking to do a last call for helping cover our post-production costs as work on the series wraps up. Help us cross the finish line. Thanks so much <3 

Hey there!!  We're Third Charm Films — A one-of-its kind collective of teen filmmakers, actors, writers, and activists turning low-budget art into powerful cinematic storytelling. We're based in Seattle, Washington. We intend to create media that’s authentic and empowers underrepresented storytellers for generations to come.



Hetero is now in post-production. We need your help to cover these costs, otherwise Hetero may take far longer to make it to your screens. Our goal is to raise an additional $3,400 to cover these following costs:

1. Assembling the soundtrack. (song royalties, additional music, professional mixing). $1750.
2. Additional storage (hard drives and cloud storage for remote editing). $450.
3. Film festival submission fees. $550.
4. Publicity, social media, and website costs. $350.
5. Northwest Film Forum gets 7% of the funds raised (they're our fiscal sponsor), and there's a hidden GoFundMe service fee. ~$300.

ABOUT HETERO — Five misfit friends scramble to save their school’s Gay Straight Alliance from an unsympathetic principal. This fast-paced, witty story captures the funny, tender, and intimate moments between friends as they face all the highs and lows of being queer in high school. 



THANK YOU SO MUCH! — We are so grateful for your support! The story of Hetero needs to be told now more than ever. This story holds deep value to every single scrappy kid involved in creating it. We won’t let your money go to waste. We provided updates on the production and behind the scenes throughout production, and will continue to do so in the coming months!

We hope to pitch the series to well-known distribution services and enter the festival circuit once post-production has finished in 2021. We will keep you updated!



MORE INFO FROM OUR JULY-AUGUST FUNDRAISER :

We have been in pre-production for our first miniseries, Hetero, for 9 months. The script itself was written over a two year period. The crew was assembled in early 2020, and casting began in March. Due to COVID-related complications, we have held online meetings, rehearsals, and gay movie nights for the past three months. Our team is prepping for a socially distanced, safe, and sanitized filming experience. We are ready to enter production!

The series is composed of five twenty-minute episodes. Production is planned from July 6 - August 18. We have 27 shooting days. Our cast and crew will be taking LOTS OF PRECAUTIONS! Contact-less temperature monitoring each day, testing for COVID-19, masks worn by everyone, hand sanitizer all around, and well-ventilated locations are a few examples.

FUNDRAISING (SUMMER 2020)

We originally planned to launch our fundraiser at the beginning of Pride Month, but in the wake of Black Lives Matter Protests, we knew the money was needed elsewhere. We pushed back the fundraising date to June 25th, as late as possible, as the need to feed and transport ourselves necessitates us launching now. More importantly, the values and representation this show provides, especially of the Black, femme, and trans voices which we have seen face special vulnerability in this past month, aligns with what we see need for in the world. We acknowledge the need for a story which prioritizes queer joy as the upmost necessity. 

We are as indie as it gets! We have ZERO money!  All donations will directly benefit the production costs of the project. Nobody is being paid. We are asking for funds in the two weeks prior to production so we have the resources we need to sustain filming. 

BUDGET (SUMMER 2020)

1) Craft services and meals. Feeding a cast and crew every day really adds up. It is mandatory we provide snacks at all times and a meal per each 6 hours of filming. $50/week for snacks = $250. $100/day for meals = $2,600. 

2) Production insurance. People can get injured or unexpected disturbances can happen or things could catch fire. You never know! Our insurance covers up to $1 million. $70/month = $140. 

3) Transportation. Mostly ferry costs! Cast and crew travel to Bainbridge Island for filming. One person traveling by car is $32 round trip. This adds up A LOT! We cannot cover the total costs but we are budgeting $1,500.

4) Stuff To Keep Us Safe! Masks, sanitizer, Clorox, Lysol. Most crew have their own supplies already but we are budgeting $100 as well.

5) Additional Props/Costumes. We are sourcing everything locally but there are a few items we haven't found! $150 to order these online. 

6) Gear/Accessories. Hard drives, SD cards, and plugins for post-production. $150. Update after weeks 1 & 2: running out of storage! Increased to $450. Additional post-production: $100.

7) Hidden fees. Northwest Film Forum gets 7% of the funds raised. $575. The hidden GoFundMe service fee: around $150.

8) COVID-19 testing (and expediting), additional travel/ferry costs needed after evaluating production progress after weeks 1 & 2. $1600.

9) Additional Days of Filming. $450.

10) Publicity, Social Media Promotion, Website Costs. $475.

(These totaled $8540. We raised $8,500 over the course of production.)

Thank you for visiting our GoFundMe campaign to help get Mental Health Media off the ground. Our goal is to reduce the suicide rate by making education available about holistic interventions in mental illness. Please watch our video for a little bit about my story and our plans for the next few years! We are a fiscally sponsored project of the Northwest Film Forum here in Seattle, WA so all contributions are tax-deductible!


We have a proof of concept available now at mentalhealthmedia.org  where you can listen to four episodes of The Mental Podcast, sign up for our socials, and read an article breaking down my own holistic treatment plan! 


A bit more about the project:

Mental Health Media is a brand and platform dedicated to distributing information about robust, holistic, evidence based mental health treatments. We want to expose patients, and caregivers to the expansive landscape of effective interventions that are available today for depression and other mental health struggles. We are producing a podcast, a film and a book series comprised of interviews with clinicians, research scientists, and patients about all of the ways there are to recover and manage mental illness. We want our audience to know that there is a world of treatment options available that most people don’t know about.

Overview:

The United States is experiencing a devastating mental illness epidemic. A shocking 46% of the population experiences a mental illness at some point. That is about 149,822,000 people.1 One person takes their own life every 13 minutes, and depression is now the number one cause of disability worldwide.3 The number of Americans disabled by mental illness doubled between 1987 and 2007, and the problem is getting worse.

Mental Health Media (Mental for short) is an intervention in this crisis. We are creating a multi-media platform that brings scientific innovations in mental health treatment to a mass audience in an accessible way. Mental is here to empower patients with information that is usually only available in dense scientific literature. Without access to current information, patients often believe they are out of options for treatment. 

Our goal is to make a direct impact in mental health treatment through education, and reverse the trend of increasing hospitalizations, disability applications, and lives lost due to mental illness.

Scientific breakthroughs in healthcare take a horrifying average of 17 years to make it into medical practice, leaving patients to cope with outdated therapies. Mental believes that patients do not have 17 years to wait. 

Some of the underutilized therapies we will be discussing on Mental include:

●  Meditation
●  Nutritional therapy
●  Exercise
●  Managing technology/ social media
●  Nature therapy
●  Establishing nurturing relationships/developing supportive communities
●  Noninvasive treatments such as exposure therapy, transcranial stimulation and EMDR
●  Emerging lower risk pharmaceuticals

Our project that will be supported by a podcast series, educational documentaries, and will utilize all social media platforms, as well as a book consisting of interviews with top doctors and research scientists about cutting-edge mental health treatments. We are building an invaluable health resource that will develop popular content with information on interventions that can save lives.

Mental is directed and produced by Emmy Award-winning film and television director Jesse Zook Mann, who became disabled due to the harsh side effects from an anti-anxiety medication. While searching for an effective intervention in his own health, he discovered a world of scientific advances from medical studies initially unfamiliar to his doctors. After years of dedicated research, he finally found life-saving treatments—now he’s ready to share his journey with others.



Impact Statement:

It is the goal of Mental to educated mental health patients, medical providers, and caretakers about scientifically proven, yet underutilized, holistic treatment into the mainstream consciousness. This will result in more patients recovering and finding ways to manage their mental illness. Our slogan: Reverse The Trend. The conversation currently in the media is one of helplessness. We are told regularly that there is a mental health epidemic but officials are dumbfounded as to the cause or what can be done about it. We want to change that conversation. We acknowledge there is a mental health crisis, but there are so many ways to help people recover that is being overlooked.

By spearheading an education campaign that is the Mental Health Media platform, we aim to influence change in how we treat mental health that will result in a one percent decline in the national suicide rate in five years.

Rick Brown is a 72-year-old boxing coach in Walla Walla, Washington. Rick spent over 25 years in and out of federal prisons for numerous incidents of felony robbery and forgery.  He turned to crime to  feed his addictive habits that began at the age of 14, Rick has since devoted his life to helping at risk youth in Walla Walla stay out of the streets and away from a life of crime. 


Rick's wife Mosetta, who stayed with him throughout his turbulent years of incarceration, helps run the boxing club which has become a safe haven for many children. 

In the spring of 2013, a teammate from Whitman and I began training at his boxing club during the off-season for basketball and became very close with Rick and Mosetta. 

The idea for a documentary was inspired by a conversation I had with Rick over lunch in the spring of 2015 as I was getting ready to finish my junior year at Whitman. Rick told me that he had been diagnosed with cancer and would have to undergo a procedure to get a tumor removed in the coming weeks. 

Having spent almost three years getting to know Rick, I was very familiar with his story and aware that he spent a significant portion of his life in prison. I was aware that Rick’s possibilities in life after incarceration were extremely limited due to the stigma that convicted felons have. I also saw first hand the impact Rick had on the youth of Walla Walla through his boxing club and knew at my core that his past mistakes should not limit his present possibilities. 


So, when Rick told me that the one thing he wanted to do before he passed away was give his wife Mosetta the wedding she always deserved, I reached out to a number of people in the Walla Walla community to help. I decided the best way to share Rick’s story and his dream of a wedding was through the art of film making. 

Teaming with Raven’s Eye Studios, a Seattle-based production company who I worked with during summers at home, I combined Rick’s story with a team of professionals who believed in the project and had the experience in documentary film making to help me tell the story correctly. 


 Like most documentaries, this project’s trajectory has taken many turns that we could not have expected at the outset. As we continued to document Rick’s narrative and his work at the gym, we realized that this story was bigger than the original scope of the project, which was to make a short film and try to raise some money from the Walla Walla community for a small wedding ceremony.

 When we told local winery, Basel Cellars, about the project, they not only loved the idea but covered the event fee at their estate.
 
We then received fiscal sponsorship from the Northwest Film Forum, Seattle’s premiere film arts organization, which guaranteed that any money donated towards the project would be 100% tax deductible to the full extent of the law. 

Our target for fund raising is $15,000. This covers all wedding costs and will allow the production team to bring Rick back to Flint, Michigan where he grew up. With the wedding now complete, we have a minimum of 75 hours of footage.


In Flint, we will be interviewing Rick’s children and sister. This trip will bring the story full circle and give a context for the anecdotes Rick describes about his upbringing. 

 So far, we have raised $10,000 through donations from The White Light Fund, The Clara & Art Bald Trust, and The Mary Garner Esary Trust.

By crowdsourcing the last $5,000 for the project, we will be able to cover all outstanding travel and post production costs and have a final cut ready for a screening the first week of September.

All donors will receive a personal invitation to the screening and special thanks in the credits. Donations are 100% tax deductible to the full extent of the law and donors can expect a receipt for tax purposes once the funding is complete. Any additional funding beyond the $5,000 goal will be put towards the boxing gym. 

The completed film will be sent to to film festivals around the country and will be made available to community centers and youth organizations interested in screening the film at their locations. 

Our belief in this project is a belief in change and wanting to share that story with others who may not have faith in their own change. For the children Rick has helped through his boxing, it means staying out of gangs and away from life of crime. For other incarcerated individuals it means that recidivism does not have to be the norm. Rick is an example of what is possible.