The SWP Patreon Page
What is Patreon?
Patreon is an online website designed to be a space where creative individuals and companies can communicate directly with their audiences. This means that creators can create projects expressly for their patrons, who pay a chosen amount in order to support the creator with their projects.
Not only does it help creators earn a monthly income in exchange for rewards and perks sent to their patrons, but the audience (the patron) has direct access with the creator, and can often influence the content they receive. It's used by Youtube videographers, webcomic artists, writers, podcasters, musicians, artists - essentially any kind of creation that can be made on a regular basis. Patreon takes a small percentage of each payment to the creator, but it's a win-win situation for everyone.
So why does Scriptworks have a Patreon page?
We decided to start a Patreon for several reasons:
1. Making movies and television is massively expensive, and it can take years to get a project off the ground with a studio or network. This allows us to collectively start making content based on our storyworlds straight away, while building an audience.
2. Writing novels takes a long amount of time investment, with no guarantee that a publisher will take on your book in a massively overcrowded market. Providing our content through Patreon will allow the people paying for it to choose what they want to see and how they want to see it. Each month, our Patrons will choose a set of characters, a topic, a theme, or an event, alongside what kind of content they want - a short story, a narrative podcast, an audiobook, a piece of live-streamed theatre, an e-graphic novel or others.
3. In today's creative economy, when you have a piece of Intellectual Property (IP), it's important to put your stamp on it to claim it. This of course means copyrighting your scripts, but it also means making sure you will be invaluable to any studios, networks or production companies who may pick up your project. Otherwise they can just buy it and do what they want with it - give to other writers to rewrite, completely change it so it's unrecognisable, or even stick it in a drawer as happens to lots of scripts. If we create content for an audience directly like this, we can get to work with our storyworlds immediately, but will also be able to go to studios, networks, and production companies with evidence that it will work as a product in the marketplace, and we will already be known as the creators of that content, so we will be indispensable.
4. Having an income for the project will mean that we can employ our producers to work on the project properly, pay for resources to ensure we can deliver high-quality short-form products, and pay for time to create more of the storyworld and the stories that come from it. Our hope is, that as our patronage and following for the project rises, we develop a rock-solid storyworld with which to take with us when the project gets backing from investors or a large network or production company.
Our patrons are already supporting us practically - their contribution pays for our live broadcasting subscription, which allows us to stream across several social media platforms at once. The more patrons we have, the more content & services we will be able to provide.
With Many Thanks To Our Patrons -
James Allen
Jennifer Le Roux
Wayne Liversidge
Angela Elise Munnoch
Marc Rhodes-Taylor
Lena Richardson
Su Shanson
Kirsten Smith
Tasmin Wyman-Walshaw
