Story of Simon Birch
People often ask about my inspirations and how I developed @the14thfactory. This is my story...
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The issue continued to be money. We lost so much in NYC on PR and pre-production. I made inroads to people in film, Hollywood art collectors, big brands but still not one dollar of sponsorship or other support.
So we innovated like crazy. We found a gang of wonderful characters that would work more for love than money and we just got going, got our hands dirty, all under the direction of Justin Diener who had zero experience of building an art installation coming from the film world but is a very smart man, somehow, along with Lining Tao, we pulled it together. Often we would go to home depot and guys hanging outside on the spot as far cheaper than regular contractors. I worked 24/7 and barely left the venue and would often spend evenings walking the venue and touching up paint and cleaning constantly (100 years of dust in there).
Everyone got on and did the best with limited resources, an amazing and loyal team. I cleaned toilets and swept the floor along with everyone else. We had no money left for marketing but two great agencies gave us a hand for little reward. @_theconfluence and the lovely Russel and @boldla who helped promote it too. There was no major paid marketing campaign, not s single advertisement, we just couldn't afford it.
But we ran out of money before opening and had to promise to give any ticket money over to the landlord or they wouldn't let us open.
And then, to make things just one level more stressful, before we opened we were denied a permit, so we were on the brink of disaster but at the last minute, PM Justin came up with the solution; make the whole exhibition a film set, people could then see the show but sign in as 'extras and maybe make a $10 donation to the 'documentary'. This meant having someone shooting some kind of film every day which turned out to be Ryan @ryantylermartinez and now, those 5000 hours of footage are being edited into a documentary. Some photos of our wonderful people who I desperately hope to bring over to the new project if we ever get it done!
