24/05/2022
Help finish the next Sea Gypsies!
In 2017, the captain and crew of the sailing vessel Infinity attempted to set the record for farthest north by attempting to sail above 80 degrees latitude to the highest inhabited settlement on earth, ominously named Alert. They gambled that the current trend of ever warming summers would continue in their favor. To accomplish this task, the ship would have to traverse the most dangerous and rarely used maritime route in the world, the Northwest Passage, a winding 4,000 mile barely surveyed labyrinth of ice, unpredictable storms, strong currents and uncharted shallows; more people have been to space than have sailed the Northwest passage, and 10x more people have summited Everest.
This expedition took 10 months to complete, and another 4 years to edit into what will eventually be a 10 episode masterpiece: 10 hours of (non-repetitive) footage showing the entire trip in its full uncensored, completely unhinged, hilarious and terrifying glory. Along the way we’ve cut some deals with mixed results (you may have seen some products of that), which gave us some funds to keep going, but they have since run dry.
The lack of funds means progress has slowed down, but not stopped. I am currently in the final fine-edit process, tinkering away and fine-tuning every minute with perfectionistic rigor. Though I’ve done most everything myself up to this point (if you want something done right you gotta just do it yourself), there are a few key elements that I can’t do myself, like adding the final musical, graphic and color touches.
I’ve gotten some great help from some super talented people and have already licensed about $80K worth of music for only $20K (intense amounts of begging and rejection therapy), and some great artists have agreed to let me use their music for low or no cost as well. I estimate that the final music score/audio mastering/color correction and graphics work will cost about $80,000-$90,000K …10 hours is a whole lot of footage to audio master/color grade/get music for. Normally this would be 10X that at least, but there’s just no way for an indie filmmaker to get that much funding short of selling organs/compromising, so I’m gonna step up my begging game (if you know a colorist/audio masterer willing to help please let me know!).
So here I am, hat in hand. This is not fundraising for Infinity Expedition or Capt Clemens – he does completely separate fundraising on his own from time to time, and I take no part in that nor does it support the Sea Gypsies projects. I funded the last film myself, I’ve never fundraised for this project, and don’t have the time or resources to do a kickstarter. This is it. This fundraising has one purpose, to help perfect the release of 10 hours of zero-compromise story to the world with no commercials and the best soundtrack possible. If you’ve enjoyed Sea Gypsies content in the past (and I think you have if you’ve read this far), please consider supporting me in the final stages of bringing this project to life. The project still has a few more years, but it will be perfect without compromise – like the first Sea Gypsies – just a whole lot longer and better (I’ve learned a few things in the last 6 years). The 10 episodes of nautical absurdity and adventure I’m creating will be well worth the wait.
https://www.seagypsies.com/help-us
P.S. When the project is finished, I’m planning to try and get it up on some easy to use/basically free platform like Amazon Prime or something along those lines. Anyone know anyone at Amazon Prime? They stopped just taking stuff from indie-doc people.
Help support making more Sea Gypsies films.
