We did it! Despite the horror of putting an ask into the world, we published our crowdfunder yesterday. It's been less than 24 hours and we're at 5%. 
You can contribute here.

Today we're at the Hoopla Improv Marathon where we perform for the third year running in a custard-pie grudge-match bit show. It's a pretty good reminder that this is all for a comedy show. 

We were more than prepared for a challenge, but I don't think either of us expected it to come this soon.

I came home late from a show and was excited to check out the footage of our crowdfunding video. Ed had made a rough cut. I watched it and suddenly felt a bit weird. It was... disappointing. Some of the visual gags didn't quite work, the camera moved too much in the tracking shot, the lighting was off in the first part and the mic we used on Ed was for shit.
I sat there in the dark worrying. All these friends had come to help us and we'd had a great time shooting it. "It's just the IndieGoGo," I thought, "so that's fine, right?" 

I went to bed feeling strange about how dissatisfied I was. It didn't sit right. I woke up the next day and got in touch with Ed to check if I was being paranoid. It was sub-par, right? We had looked at the footage on site, but only on the camera itself. We couldn't see the shakiness, we only checked the mics were working, not the quality of our back-up mic (we were missing a lead). We were both kind of sad. We gave it another thinking day, then agreed - let's face it - in order to ask people for help and funding we were going to have to put some more work in.

It didn't have to be amazing. The whole point is that we are looking for support to make something professional-looking and we can't do that without money. But we knew we could do this better. 

We rescheduled. Some of our kind cast of extras couldn't free themselves from normal human jobs at the only time we had free. We struggled to get people. We pulled the second attempt at a shoot as we didn't have a cast in time. We desperately wanted Elly because she'll be playing Lindsay (the lead to our Sideliners) in the series and she's damn funny. We changed the script a little and shot the bits with her alone. Two of our industry chums got in touch. They wondered why we weren't calling in their offers for help just yet. We felt embarrassed. There are so many talented and willing people. Amanda Palmer's Art of Asking was singing in our ears.

Time was running out and we were both due to teach and perform at the Maydays Improv Retreat in Dorset the following week. How on earth were we going to get this done any time soon? There. Shoot it there. Borrow some students and friends on a lunch break and kindly ask Rob to shoot it. 

Boom. Now it's clean, it's funny and the sound is much better. It's not perfect, it's still a scrappy freebie and a collection of favours, but we like it and we hope it will inspire our friends to help us make the pilot. And those two friends; one is going to take a look at our IGG edit and the other is our new Director.

Watch this space.

We are both damn excited, but also the anxiety is hitting us gently like a coffee in a tea-drinker. We're only taping a tiny IndieGoGo video, but corralling a cast of ten and a crew of one is still a job that needs to be done well. We both over-thank everyone on set because these kind friends have gone out of their way to help us. They keep thanking us too. We forget sometimes that it is just delightful to be in a stupid video for an hour or two, despite having a super jolly time ourselves.