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NewswireToday - /newswire/ -
Oakland, CA, United States, 2012/07/23 - Regina Mason, a native of Oakland, California, has spent fifteen years authenticating the pioneering narrative of her direct ancestor William Grimes, author of the first fugitive slave narrative in American History. Her discovery unfolds on film.
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Regina Mason, the great-great-great-granddaughter of runaway slave, William Grimes, seeks funding on crowd-funding website Kickstarter.com, to finance a feature-length docudrama chronicling her journey to uncover her ancestor’s life as he told it in his book,“The Life of William Grimes, The Runaway Slave.”
After nearly two decades of research to trace the life and times of her runaway slave ancestor—a man who wrote the first fugitive slave autobiography in American History in 1825—and after years of telling audiences around the country about her journey, Ms. Mason seeks funding to turn her story into the full-length docudrama, Gina's Journey: The Search for William Grimes.
Funding through “crowd-funding”
In 2009, Regina Mason teamed up with San Francisco Bay Area filmmaker Sean Durant, to develop her story into a feature-length motion picture. Around that time,"crowd-funding" sites like Kickstarter.com and Indiegogo.com began to gain popularity as a way for individuals to solicit the public to fund important films or other projects before being presented to wealthy investors or big movie studios.
The duo personally financed a movie trailer and began screening it at Regina's lectures on college campuses around the country. The overwhelming response and reaction by the crowds who attended re-assured both Mason and Durant that a movie was eagerly anticipated and would likely get public funding.
Since Kickstarter.com funding is an all or nothing endeavor, meaning if the stated funding goal isn’t reached, no funding is provided. The producers are aiming for the more obtainable $35,000, even though the actual budget needed for filming $125,000.
Their hope is that generous people who see the importance of this project will support them to the $125,000 level, which is the amount needed to create a film that richly portrays the whole story.
Their goal is to begin production in Fall 2012. Once completed, the film will seek theatrical distribution, be entered into festivals, and offered to the History Channel and HBO for national broadcast.
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