This is what I have done in one week and two days:

I have filmed over 10 hours (not including little asides on my Flip and  Canon G9 cameras). I am pretty much filming EVERYTTHING. Filming it like it might be a personal documentary —Nina Davenport style. I watched Operation Filmmaker before I came to Nepal and it inspired to keep the camera rolling. I don’t know what the story is. At this point, it is ALL IMPORTANT. Even the drinking tea part.

I have been drinking a lot of really yummy tea.

(That said, having me be part of the documentary still kind of makes me queasy.)

(That said, I kind of like filming my own reaction to things. It makes it like it really happened. This place is so OUT OF THIS WORLD to me, I question its existence even when I am existing in it.)

I have been working with the raddest fixer, translator, scooter taxi, filmmaker ever, Ramyata Limbu. She is seriously rad. She has made two documentaries: Daughters of Everest about the first Sherpa women to summit Everest and Sari Soldiers about 6 women in the Maoist conflict. She also runs the Kathmandu Mountain Film Festival. She is really good at her job and I am so thankful to have her.

I have found a translator/ transcriber named Era. She has worked for Al Jazeera and other news organization out of Kathmandu. She has the most lovely smile. She speaks Nepali, English and French and has a six year old son. I am excited to get my first tape transcript back. There is something so solid about having a tape both logged and on paper.

I have talked about my project A LOT with A LOT of different people and everyone is interested.

I have thought a lot. I am constantly thinking about what I am doing and what it means and what the story is and what will help the world.

Here is me thinking TOO HARD while enjoying a salty lassi.

I also prayed about it after lighting one of these candles in a Buddhist Monastery.

Things I have NOT done:

slept (very little anyway)

go to the Bryan Adams concert (First western concert EVER in Nepal. It was a HUGE deal. HUGE! But I didn’t go. My host and good friend here works for the embassy and handles logistics of all American deaths in Nepal. The concert came with a stampede warning. Luckily there wasn’t one.)

relaxed (Oh, well there was that one hour and a half massage where they massaged everything including my eyelids and it cost $20).

You’ve got the cards–there are three different ones…

We wrap them up with little raffia ties so they’re giftier.

And inside there are these little cards, so that you can tell your loved ones how much you donated in their name…

And on the back side of that card is a little menu giving a few examples of what we might spend donations on…

We invite you to email us to get some cards. No pressure to use them only to give Girlworld donations as gifts–they’re nice notecards too.

If you’d like to share it around, we can also send you a DVD of the current 20 minute work in progress cut.

We want to send HUGE thanks to Liv, who masterminded, orchestrated and alchemied this event, and to Gina and Seth who hosted. You guys rule!

Liv shows off the star of her show, the Pear Ginger Cheesecake. It was uproariously good (We know where you can get one, and help Girlworld while you’re at it, hint, hint!).

Liv baked a ton of delicious desserts. From memory (left to right): Fig tarte, Pear Ginger Cheesecake, French Buttercake with pear, Almond poundcake, and in the middle, almondy shortbread cookies and gluten-free yum-yum crisps. We and others fleshed out the table with some other goodies, and there was wine and tea and coffee and …

O figs!

We put together some party favors (mainly gift cards, so you can gift people a donation to Girlworld if you like. If you’d like some, just holler, perhaps there are some gift-giving occasions coming up on your calendar? All tax deductible of course!)

Amy and I got kind of dolled up, and talked a bit to the assembled hordes, then we screened our 20 minute cut.

Bunches of lovely people, enjoying our film.

It was a really buoying event for us. Total proceeds from this event as of now are just under $1000! We are thrilled and grateful!

We’ve been planning to return to Nepal for a second round of filming in early 2011, and that money (and maybe even more importantly the support) is going to make a huge difference in our ability to do our jobs well during that trip.

Thank you all!

But we left something rather important out of the conversation, which is that while we have begun fundraising, we have not yet started to use the money we are raising. In other words, in spite of the fancy long budgets we posted that make it look like we’re getting paid to do this, we are not.

The way it’s working right now is, we are banking our proceeds from fundraising in an account administered by Shunpike, our fiscal sponsor (our arrangement allows us to accept donations and give receipts for tax deduction purposes, making us a virtual non-profit, among other blessings they confer upon us). When that account grows beyond our arbitrarily set go/no-go sum (currently $25,000), then we feel we’ll be able to ‘start the clock’, as it were, and actually begin paying ourselves for this Girlworld work.

Until that time, all our expenses, for running our lives, for running Girlworld, for keeping our cameras in good shape and macaroni on our table… all that money comes from our regular day-to-day freelance work. Which we richly enjoy, and which we would love to be doing more of. And even more, we’d love to reach (and exceed) that $25,000 Girlworld goal so that we can be doing less freelance and more Girlworld.

It’s a funny balance, and we’re trying every day to get it right.

Which is quite sensible, of course, as if we’re doing our jobs, the project already has a budget; we must know how much the project will cost (is costing!), how much we have, and where our points of flexibility and vulnerability lie.

What is confusing about this, however, is that different (potential) funders have different priorities. A huge spectrum of them.

To put it as simply as possible, at one end of the spectrum we see funders/grantmakers/donors who want to see a stripped down, lean budget that reflects our passion, resourcefulness and efficiency.

At the other end of the spectrum are the folks who want to see a budget that fully takes into account all of the financial realities of undertaking a project of this scope. They want to know we have a handle on everything we might bump into, so we don’t get caught out by some unexpected expense. They want to see we aren’t underpaying ourselves or our collaborators, or underestimating the needs and expenses of promoting the film, etc.

Some folks want the budget to reflect just the hard production expenses; some must see that every bit of project preparation, production, promotion, postproduction, outreach/impact strategy and anything else even vaguely related to the project is accounted for.

We end up writing very different-looking budgets for different potential funders. Which felt a bit funny at first, as though it were somehow dishonest.

It is not, however. And we’re going transparent on this point, because we believe it’s something important for everyone involved (mostly ourselves) to understand.

Say we show a project budget of ~$450,000 to one funder, and ~$75,000 to another, to pluck a couple numbers out of the air. What are the implications? Have a look at the sample budget PDFs linked below, if you like:

1) GWBudgetLOWLINE.xls

2) GWBudgetHIGHLINE.xls

Well, first things first. We’re used to doing this work for almost nothing. We’re in this for passion, not for money, and have accustomed ourselves to living pretty humbly. We’re content with that, and it affords us the flexibility to make pretty nice looking little films for not much money.

So if you look at the “Lowline” budget, it reflects us, out there doing this work, being a little bit scrappy, but ultimately getting to make pretty much the film we believe needs to get made.

That said, whenever we look at the highline budget, we get all quivery, thinking of what it would be like to actually get paid to do this work.

From our immediate family perspective, the main difference between the lowline budget and the highline is that the former would enable us to make a film without going into debt. The latter would enable us to work and live (and save a bit!) as though we had a real job, albeit a modest paying one.

And more to the point, we get Super Excited thinking about building a fully up-to-speed social impact/outreach/education/call-to-action campaign around this thing. That costs a LOT of money, but we are coming to believe it is truly the key to making the movie do its job.

We hit upon the idea of laying our fundraising process bare, making it fully (or almost fully) transparent, in the hope that everyone will be richer for it.

We want the high dollar funders (Hello, Sundance? Girlworld on line three) to know that we are going to make this movie, even if it means doing it for table scraps. And we want the more efficiency oriented funders to know that we have really well developed ideas about how to scale our project larger if/as funding permits. That they’ll be in line to be part of something even bigger than they bargained for, in other words.

So over the next few weeks (or longer, likely) we expect to be laying out our fundraising strategy(/ies) in unusual detail. To the degree possible, we will lay out what we’re thinking and doing, including the numbers that are swirling all around us.

We will talk to a handful of individuals and organizations who have given to support Girlworld, and we will ask them to share their reasons. We will ask them what we can do to ensure continued support, and what we might have done differently in approaching them.

And we will ask them to let us share their responses (anonymously if they prefer). With some luck, this thread will become a lively discussion of fundraising strategies, and we will learn something which will help us fulfill the potential of Girlworld.

Keep an eye on this space.