For the eighth year in a row, Kickstarter creators will debut a diverse slate of film projects at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, April 18–29. Twelve Kickstarter-funded films will screen at the festival, including including six documentaries, three shorts, two virtual-reality films, and one major restoration of an award-winning indie classic from the 1990s.

The filmmakers in this year’s lineup work in a range of cinematic disciplines, and have made use of Kickstarter in different ways. With the support of their backers, Anthony Jannelli and Robert Pietri were able to animate their short film about The Velvet Underground’s disastrous first public performance; Asad J. Malik developed the technology to make his augmented-reality documentary about the experiences of Muslims living in the United States possible; and Charlie Schwan and Adrian Siordia designed the apocalyptic 1970s/1980s setting of their darkly funny short film.

Join us in congratulating all of the Kickstarter creators whose films are premiering at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, and read on to learn more about them.

A couch is much more than a piece of furniture. Each couch has a personality, a heart, and a soul. Many of the most pleasant moments of our lives are spent in the warm embrace of a couch. 

And so, at PAX East this year, April 5–8, we wish to welcome you to Kickstarter's Couchland. We will have not one but four couches for you to settle into and play some excellent games — couches from different lands and different times, each with their own personality, all waiting to guide you gently through Couchland.

Here are the games you can expect to encounter at Couchland:

“[Our] products need to invite chance and accident in the way that they’re made — an element where you lose control and you don’t quite know how the product will end up when you start making it.”

Granby Workshop is an architectural ceramics studio founded by the Turner Prize-winning design collective Assemble. The workshop grew out of a larger effort to revitalize Liverpool’s Granby neighborhood, producing distinctive architectural materials to renovate local homes and creating new manufacturing jobs within the community.

In the video above, Assemble designer Lewis Jones and Sumuyya Khader of Granby Workshop discuss their design process and offer a look at how they prepared to launch their first Kickstarter project, for a line of ceramics called Splatware.

We’ve got a few nice product improvements to talk about today, including the debut of the Creator Dashboard in the Kickstarter Android app.

In case you haven’t seen it on our site or iOS app, the Creator Dashboard gives creators a bird’s-eye view of the latest activity on a live or completed project. In the latest update to our Android app, the dashboard offers:

• An overview of funding progress. 
• A breakdown of the most popular rewards. 
• The top sources of pledges. 
• Quick access to messages, as well as all the projects you’ve launched or collaborated on.

This upgrade to our Android app is available right now.

As part of our mission to help bring creative projects to life, we're always looking for ways to help artists and creators find the support and resources they need to make their ideas a reality.

Last year, we launched the Creators-in-Residence program at Brooklyn HQ. Over the course of three residencies, we welcomed more than thirty Kickstarter creators into the building. They accomplished a lot: they launched campaigns, created and produced new work, shipped thousands of rewards, and hosted performances, workshops, and events.

How do you get into running if you find it, well, boring? If you’re Adrian Hon, you turn it into a mobile game — with zombies.

In 2011, the CEO and founder of the independent games developer Six to Start partnered with writer Naomi Alderman to create Zombies, Run!, an audio-based game that transforms your run into an adrenaline-fueled adventure during the zombie apocalypse.

“Kickstarter seemed like an obvious idea for Zombies, Run! as a way to find out whether people even cared about [our] idea and whether they were willing to put money behind it,” Hon says.

As a college student, songwriter Julia Nunes began sharing her music on YouTube. “I thought you just put your stuff there and you could send it to someone, but no one [else] is going to find it,” she says. So she was stunned when the videos began racking up views and reaching total strangers.

Suddenly, she found herself touring with her musical idols — she’s played with Ben Folds, Ben Kweller, and Weezer, among others — and thinking about releasing an album.

“I never thought I could have a sustainable career [as a musician],” Nunes says. “The world of the music-industry machine didn’t interest me.” But she did have a cache of songs she wanted to record with the help of a producer.

This year, eleven Kickstarter-funded films screened at the SXSW Film Festival. Today, we’re delighted to announce that six of those films went on to win a total of seven awards.

Jim Cummings took home the Grand Jury Award for Narrative Feature for his Kickstarter-funded film, Thunder Road, while Kickstarter alum Hao Wu won the Grand Jury Award for Documentary Feature for his new film, People’s Republic of Desire.

“It’s always been Kickstarter’s aim to be the the home of exceptional, creatively ambitious film projects that explore the form to the fullest. We’re so proud of the Kickstarter-funded SXSW award winners, who all more than meet that aspiration,” says Elise McCave, Kickstarter’s Director of Narrative Film. “Congratulations, everyone — we can’t wait to see what you make next.”

Read on to learn more about these six films, and join us in giving a big round of applause to the filmmakers who received awards this year — and the backers who made these films possible.