Especially for those who are accustomed to our annual Kickstarter campaigns, here are various topics detailing the differences and details of this year's non-Kickstarter campaign.
- Why aren't you using Kickstarter this year?
- When am I charged for my rewards?
- What about post-campaign surveys with shipping addresses & shirt sizes?
- So, if I'm charged right away, how do I make changes to my level?
- Without Kickstarter, but with purchasing Tiers up front, how do Add-ons work?
- How do I get charged for shipping If I'm getting a shipped Tier?
- How will I know about stretch goals and new add-ons?
- I purchased a Streaming Tier, how will I get access to the Streaming Event in December?
- Where's the Best of 2026 Collection on Blu-ray? How do I order that?
- What about DVDs? You used to make both DVD and Blu-ray.
- My DVD player is fine, I have a huge DVD collection, and am not interested in buying a bunch of new technology. What about me?
- Will you ever stream these collections?
Why aren't you using Kickstarter this year?
We love Kickstarter, and over 12 years, they've made a lot possible for us. But, it's never really been geared towards funding events. Most of the features they have are for their biggest campaign types: board games, new tech, etc. When they infrequently roll out new features, they seem half baked. Their add-on system and their built-in pledge manager are still missing obvious features, which limits the utility so much, it caused us several false starts because we couldn't see how things would work until we were already in the thick of it. In the end, we still had to work with third parties (who take their own fees).
We don't get all the funds from a Kickstarter campaign. The funding you see is reduced by 8-10% with various fees. It's all very reasonable for the services at a certain scale, but a $50,000 campaign will lose almost $5000 right off the top. That's the amount we'd spend on a really great guest, or to put up several guests in hotels for the fest.
By purchasing reward Tiers and add-ons here, your support flows directly to the festival. Every penny (besides typical card processing fees) goes to operating this year's festival and making the rewards you receive in exchange. It also benefits you in the form of uninflated costs.
Their system has also always had weird bottlenecks... why not just collect shirt sizes and addresses up front, during the pledge stage, instead of using a clunky survey system? This has always caused headaches. So, we set out to use a more conventional cart-style system that reduces those bottlenecks, at the cost of a few fundraising niceties. Like...
When am I charged for my rewards?
In our new system, you're charged immediately.
Like a traditional e-commerce site, you're buying your reward level out right, just like when you donate to support PBS and get a "Blake's 7" T-shirt and keychain as a thank you (just me?). The Kickstarter "all-or-nothing" system was great for building suspense and creating a sense of community urgency. It also let you make choices early on, then make changes throughout the campaign, until the campaign closes, when everyone's levels were locked down and funds were collected. This is nice, but fully 90% of our backers choose their level on day one, then never make any changes or add anything else. It also always resulted in several failed payments, a few of which would never be resolved. In this new system, for those 90% of backers, they choose their level of support, pay, and can be done until the festival.
What about post-campaign surveys with shipping addresses & shirt sizes?
A thing of the past. In this system, you make all these selections up front: you give us your shipping address, shirt sizes, add-on options, etc., up front, and checkout. It's simple and we have all your fulfillment info on day one, instead of scrambling to get it weeks after the campaign ends.
So, if I'm charged right away, how do I make changes to my level?
TL;DR Contact us, and we'll edit your order to add or remove items to match your new desired tier and either send a payment link or partial refund.
This is the main gotcha in our new system. It operates roughly like a typical shopping cart, so you make your choices, checkout, and pay. For most backers, that's it. There's not a self-service mechanism for alterations.
Keep in mind we're here, and we're here to help. Unlike the cumbersome level system on Kickstarter and the weird "Manage my pledge" interface, all levels are just collections of products, so if you want to upgrade to a higher level, just contact us and we will add the additional products from a higher level to your order and send you a payment link for the difference. Likewise, if you want a lower level: contact us, we modify your order to match the lower level you want, and refund you the difference. It's all just button presses on our side. Easy-peasy... actually much simpler than making this kind of change in Kickstarter or any pledge manager we've used.
Without Kickstarter, but with purchasing Tiers up front, how do Add-ons work?
Once you purchase your core tier, your account will be enabled to browse and purchase add-ons on our HPLFF Fundraiser Add-ons page. To access the page, you must log in with the same account that you completed your core Tier purchase with. You simply purchase any add-ons you want, anytime during our campaign. We have backend logic that sweeps all fundraiser core and add-on orders you make during this time, and combines all the products into one big list for fulfillment (whether you're having your package shipped, or you're picking up in person). So, buy an add-on, and a few minutes later it is added to your main order.
Important: for this to work, you must keep your shipping address (even if you're picking up in person) and name the same between orders. Otherwise, it will assume you're making separate orders, and we'll have to combine them manually.
How do I get charged for shipping If I'm getting a shipped Tier?
TL;DR After the end of the campaign, we'll send you a payment link for the total weight of everything you ordered during the campaign.
As with our Kickstarter campaigns for the last few years, shipping is charged separately from the main fundraiser. This is mostly so that we can calculate shipping after the campaign ends, when you've chosen all the tiers and add-ons you're going to add. Shipping calculations with Kickstarter and pledge managers has always been very complicated, because these systems don't really know how much the individual items weigh. Kickstarter doesn't even have weight-based shipping, just per-level/per-region rates. In some pledge manager systems, we could assign a weight to the core tiers, but it treated add-ons as a fully separate box with flat or basic weight-based shipping. This means we'd spend a dozen hours calculating shipping tables to allow for complicated variations.
For example, if someone got a Streaming Deluxe package, how much do we need to charge for a Challenge From Beyond book add-on if they're in Australia? How about if they got a Shadow Out of Time and have a heavier package - will it push it over the 4lb First Class International limit? What about if they add two books? Can we split the shipping difference, since the highest required shipping is too high for many backers, but the lowest is too low for a few?
It was highly, needlessly complicated, because the systems could never fully reckon the total weight of a full package. There just wasn't a way, so shipping was always a carefully designed formula of averages to make sure the fundraiser didn't lose money, but didn't overcharge our backers too too much.
However, at the end of this year's campaign, we'll already have an accurate weight for your entire package, because the weights from all the items, both core and add-ons, all get merged and added together by a modern e-commerce system. When the campaign is over, we'll check this total weight, calculate accurate shipping and send you a payment link. For the majority of backers, shipping will be somewhat cheaper than in previous years (with the caveat that shipping itself is more expensive than in previous years, but we hope it evens out).
How will I know about stretch goals and new add-ons?
We recently created a HPLFF Substack, and this is where you'll find the granular (and more frequent) updates about the Fundraiser. You can visit at will, or subscribe to it and get the updates in your inbox (or notification if you use the substack app). We'll still be using the festival newsletter and social media to make big announcements about the Festival, but our Substack is where you can reliably stay in the loop. You can also ask us any questions there that we haven't covered here :)
I purchased a Streaming Tier, how will I get access to the Streaming Event in December?
About a week before the streaming event, we will be sending instructions via email on how to log in to Eventive and watch the films and extra content. You'll want to make sure that you add the hplff.com and eventive.org domains to your email whitelist so you don't miss anything! If you purchased a tier with a streaming festival pass, but have not seen an email by a day or two before the streaming festival (December 4-6th), please message us so we can get you sorted out.
Where's the Best of 2026 Collection on Blu-ray? How do I order that?
Our yearly "Best of" collections are highly dependent on us raising enough funds in the fundraiser to be able to afford to produce them. Typically, once our highest Stretch Goal is reached (check our updates for Stretch Goal announcements, when we release them), we commit to contracting with filmmakers and producing the collection, and make a Blu-ray add-on available for you to purchase.
The "Best of" blu-rays are produced the following year (so we'll make the 2026 volume in 2027) and shipped when it's ready, after we've confirmed your current shipping address.
What about DVDs? You used to make both DVD and Blu-ray.
This is one of the hard choices we've made over the past few years. There are three main reasons for ceasing production of standard definition DVDs, in favor of only making Blu-rays: inventory storage, quality, and sales.
To produce professionally pressed DVDs and Blu-rays, the minimum quantity is 1000 (for each format). When making both, we'd get a shipment of 2000 units. In the fundraiser campaign, we'd typically sell 100-150 pre-orders, but the rest would frequently takes 5-7 years to sell. But, every single year, we'd add 2000 to that inventory, which makes the space needs snowball, beyond our ability to store in our home office, and paid storage just makes every unit drain our funds, the longer it is in storage. By cutting that in half and only producing Blu-rays, we cut our yearly storage snowball in half too.
Quality is also a big factor. The films we're including now are typically great looking, highly textured films, made in High Definition. In the modern era, they also frequently use important small text or details, because those things are clear in high definition. A DVD just can't contain the necessary detail to do justice to modern films. The resolution of a standard DVD is 1/4 the size of the high definition version we put on a Blu-ray, which matches the resolution of a 1080p HD TV. This means that on many TVs, the picture would only take up one quarter of the full screen, if it wasn't scaled up to fill the screen, which results in fuzziness and the appearance of visual artifacts from the compression process. Even a Blu-ray image would only fill 1/4 of a newer 4K TV screen. To get these movies looking as good as possible takes a lot of tweaking and adjustments per-scene to get the picture looking great, even when compressed. We think we made great looking DVDs, but getting the films to look great at that tiny of a resolution took a lot more work than making a great-looking Blu-ray, which requires far less time and labor.
These factors combined with waning sales of the standard definition format, mean that it takes far longer to sell DVDs than Blu-rays, keeping our storage and storage costs ballooned, and creating much longer royalty accounting cycles for filmmakers. The Blu-ray format is just much more popular, and is a better looking, better sounding, investment for collectors.
My DVD player is fine, I have a huge DVD collection, and am not interested in buying a bunch of new technology. What about me?
As collectors, we also have a huge DVD collection. We still also have an old DVD player. But, all Blu-ray players also play DVDs, and in most cases they play them better than your old DVD player, because they have better upscaling for bigger TVs. Blu-ray player technology is no longer new... the first consumer players came out 20 years ago in 2006. It's a highly vetted, popular, and reliable technology that can slot in your entertainment center in place of your DVD player.
We have a relatively new Blu-ray player that we got from a big chain store a couple years ago that cost about $50, and plays everything we make perfectly through a single HDMI cable. Even if you have an old TV without HDMI ports, there are Blu-ray players that will connect with the old-style RCA cables. There are a lot of options, and even the most basic player will play every HD Blu-ray we make. We don't (currently) make 4K Blu-rays, and don't have immediate plans to, so for watching the grand majority of (all, not just ours) film media, you only need a regular HD Blu-ray player. It's totally worth it; the picture looks better, the sound sounds more awesome, the discs themselves are a lot more durable and scratch-resistant, ensuring they'll be part of your collection longer.
We're sorry that some people feel left out, because we no longer make DVDs, but it just doesn't make good sense, considering the production costs, storage needs, and very small number of sales. But, a new inexpensive Blu-ray player will let you watch both old DVDs and newer Blu-rays; not just ours, but those from the wide world of entertainment.
Will you ever stream these collections?
Yes, and we have. Currently, you can rent or buy our Best of 2021 short film collection on Amazon Prime video on demand. It looks and works great. Unfortunately, shortly after we made that, Amazon stopped offering self-service creation of titles. To continue making newer collections available, we're going to need to start using an aggregator service. These cost a lot of money, but they can make the films available in a lot more places, like Apple TV, YouTube TV, Amazon, Vudu, Tubi, etc. Stay tuned for information about upcoming streaming collections.