17,500 quid in the kitty

Location Lying on sofa at home, Camden | Mood Relief | Date 14 December 2004
Filed in:
Author (full name): 
Franny Armstrong
Location: 
Lying on sofa at home, Camden
Mood: 
Relief
Soundtrack: 
Cat purring on my belly
Ailments: 
Knee still painful after operation on football injury
Date: 
14 December 2004
Current crisis: 
Will I ever walk with 30 kg of camera gear again?
Current silver lining: 
33 people gave us their money last night

I can't remember being really scared about anything for a long, long time. Walking home through the woods aged 17 after watching Silence of the Lambs is still my worst ever. And getting locked up and given tea by the dam construction company on our first night in India was fairly terrifying.

But tonight was worse. I had to stand in front of 35 hushed people in a small room in Soho and explain why they should lend us their money so we can make our oil film, now titled Crude (thanks Justin). It is so, so much harder to explain what a film is going to be, than to answer questions about what a film is. I was shaking. Luckily, John Battsek was great and Mark B - one of the sponsors of Drowned Out and now Crude - made a tear-jerking speech about how our generation is probably the last that will have the opportunity to do anything about climate change, so what difference will 500 quid make? He then went green and collapsed - turned out he had cellulitis and spent the next five days in hospital on a drip.

Anyway, it worked. We sold 33 of our 100 'shares' on the spot. (Not actually shares, I now know, as that would be illegal without a piece of paper with an official stamp, so they are loans). That's 17,500 quid in the kitty - about half of what Drowned Out cost in total - over three years - so we should be able to get pretty far.