Professional Context - Further Ideas

I have been thinking about the presentation of my research results; we are supposedly able to report in a form relevant to our subject area, so I would like to make an animated documentary.

For this, I will attempt to get as many of my interviewees to agree to an interview in person, so I can capture audio to animate over, and perhaps even video the interview and use rotoscoping techniques.

I have also started conducting research in the form of existing articles on the subject from places like Skillset, Imagine Animation, CrowdCube, IndieGoGo etc.

And lastly I am currently preparing a small personal project to put up as a crowdfunded animation, in order to gain first-hand experience of the process, which I will make live in the next week or two.

Professional Context - First Few Weeks and Initial Ideas

For a number of weeks now we have been introduced to areas of creative work outside of our own specialism in order to make us think about a subject worthy of research with respect to professionalism.

I think it would be most interesting and beneficial to research something which is a common issue to all disciplines - something they all have in common - and relates to what it is to be professional.

It strikes me that what sets a professional apart from a hobbyist is that the professional is getting paid for their work, so I began considering the issue of funding streams.

Getting funding for creative work has long been a matter of (mostly) conforming to certain paths. For example public grants, studio backing, private investment. However, a new method is arising now which could be a big opportunity for many people - crowd funding.

I already know a little about this. The general principal is that you join a crowd-funding site and put yourself out to the public, offering 'perks' as incentive for them to invest small amounts, but in large numbers, into your creative project.

I would really like to investigate this further; is it a sustainable method of funding? can anyone benefit? is it set to grow and change the funding landscape for creatives?

I will focus my research around the animation industry, but crowd-funding itself does not, so I will also research into possibilities for other disciplines (particularly music and filmmaking) as well.