Sky Fighter
By Lukas Kendall ’96
Gen XX
By Honora Talbott ’07
“I’m really grateful that it exists,” says Honora Talbott ’07 of the crowdfunding she used to finance her short film Gen XX. “At the same time, it feels like you’re asking for your favor, and you get one shot at it.” Lukas Kendall ’96, who crowdfunded his short film Sky Fighter, agrees: “It was not an enjoyable process. It was highly labor-intensive. But it was what was necessary to see the campaign through.”
Both filmmakers successfully raised money through crowdfunding operations (Talbott on Seed&Spark, Kendall on Indiegogo) to produce their films. Crowdfunding, which encompasses multiple platforms, has become an increasingly popular tool for low-budget films, and for Talbott and Kendall, it allowed them to realize their visions and take crucial steps in their filmmaking careers.
Talbott, a theater and dance major at Amherst, works as an actor and writer in online comedy sketches and short-form videos, and she initially envisioned Gen XX as a similarly limited production. But her idea to make “the reverse Handmaid’s Tale, but funny,” about a future matriarchal society with men attending grooming schools, became more and more ambitious: “The small idea expanded to be the biggest project I’ve ever done.”
For Kendall, Sky Fighter started as a big idea, a single-location sci-fi thriller that he hoped would be his debut as a feature filmmaker. But Kendall—a music major who had a long career as the founder of Film Score Monthly—scaled it back into a short film as a proving ground, both for the concept and for himself as a first-time director. “There was a feature script, and there wasn’t a single scene that would be adequate to shoot as a demo, so I wrote a new story based on the same premise,” he says. “And then the new story ended up being better than the feature script.”
Gen XX (left) is “the reverse Handmaid’s Tale, but funny.” Sky Fighter (top) is set in space.
In addition to crowdfunding, both filmmakers drew on their Amherst networks to help with production. Theater and dance’s Peter Lobdell ’68, senior resident artist emeritus, came on as a producer for Gen XX, and Talbott and Kendall independently each enlisted Daniel Marks ’06 as their cinematographer. “The Amherst mafia’s been very, very good to me,” Kendall jokes.
Talbott and Kendall hope to use their shorts as springboards to larger projects, with crowdfunding as the initial boost to make that happen. “When I started writing, I started developing the world and it got bigger and bigger and bigger, and then I was like, ‘This is really a television series,’” says Talbott, who’s looking to show Gen XX to potential outlets for TV. Kendall, meanwhile, has tentative funding lined up, based on the strength of the short, for a feature version of Sky Fighter.
For now, Sky Fighter is available online via sci-fi short-film label DUST. Talbott plans to take Gen XX on the film festival circuit whenever possible. As time-intensive as the crowdfunding experience was—sending out newsletters, providing swag to backers, repeatedly following up with connections for pledges—there was value even beyond the funding: “At the end of the day,” Talbott says, “I felt really, really supported.”
Bell is a Las Vegas-based writer and critic and a frequent reviewer for Amherst magazine.
Courtesy of Lukas Kendall (sky fighter) and Honora Talbot (Gen xx)