Kickstarter

Creator Frown Town on August 4, 2011

Dear Daniel,

First off all, I want to sincerely say that I'm terribly sorry we've been a disappointment, and our project has been plagued with setbacks. We owe it to you to lay it all out on the table, so here it goes:

We never meant it to be like this. We spent a year and a half with blinkers on, building puppets in a basement, never conceiving of how difficult actual production was. We two artists trying something new and huge and possibly impossible. We made some awfully pretty puppets but when it came time to found a production company it turns out we didn't have nearly what it took. We did the Kickstarter funding with the belief that we'd be able to finish filming by last September. That was utterly wrong, and only one of massive time underestimations we made. Each new phase of production came with it's own setbacks and limitations. Phauntleroy, an integral character, was terribly unwieldily, difficult to operate and still isn't working. Our voice acting sucked. Then Andy moved across the country, and the team was split up disastrously. We lost months trying to fix it with animation, which ended up a visually-unappealing dead end. The whole time, we didn't want to admit to ourselves, much less to the strangers and friends who'd trusted us enough to fund us, that Frown Town was on life support. So we kept our traps shut. The updates stopped and the massive feelings of guilt started. Not continuously posting our failures and setbacks to our blog and Kickstarter was really wrong of us. We justified it to ourselves by believing that it wouldn't exactly have helped with the dwindling morale, but that was the easy way out.

So here's the low down at this point in the game. The funding was spent by the end of last summer on sets, equipment, and the merchandise we produced and send off to funders. If we'd known we'd have had these problems, we would not have done the fundraising drive. Since funding, the project's been sputtering along in various incarnations for a year now. It's not dead, but it's definitely not in the bloom of health. Both of us refuse to give up hope on it, although we're nowhere close to the stage of production that we wished we would be at by now. If we do shake the curse and manage to get it off the ground, even in truncated form, we will fulfill what we owe everyone and then some. It's been a long slog of false starts so far. We were good at making pretty puppets, but we've been shit at making a show with them. Creative projects of vast scale take years to accomplish. Our biggest mistake wasn't thinking we could do this, it was thinking we could do this on any kind of reasonable time frame. We have only four hands between us, and only Andy is ambidextrous.

Frown Town remains the best and most promising project either of us has so far conceived of or worked on. We will still do our damndest to find a way to justify the time we've put into it, and the trust and money you gave to us.

Thank you for believing in us, sorry we let you down. And sorry most of all for not having kept you informed on the state of the show, you deserved better.

Andy & Steve