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Canyon Country Actress Myrna Velasco Looks To Kickstart Career With Kickstarter.com

myrna_velasco_pirate_jennyCanyon Country actress Myrna Velasco is looking to kickstart her acting career. Appropriately enough she’s turning to a website called Kickstarter.com.

romeo_brooks“I think it’s a great idea and if you’re really passionate about something people will see that and they’ll want to help out. So I think it’s great,” said Velasco.

An independent film Velasco starred in called “Pirate Jenny” is looking for funds to complete post-production. The director Romeo Brooks (at left) placed a trailer for the film on the Kickstarter website and is asking for financial help.

Just call it E-patronage.

“Kickstarter is sort of in this long line of history of art patronage. If you go back to the Enlightenment you have the Medici family that were big arts patrons. They would bring finances to artists, and creatives and architects,” said Justin Kazmark, Director of Communications for Kickstarter.com


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Time jump from the 15th Century and Leonardo DiVinci to the present day and you still have artists needing cash. When creators of all types have an idea they want to get off the ground, they turn to Kickstarter.

“They’ll launch a project and then they get the word out to their friends, family and fans and spread the idea through their networks. And in exchange for funding, the project creator will give the backer, the people that pledge the money, something in return,” said Kazmark.

In the case of helping fund films the donor can receive screen credit. In other cases people give for the simple feeling of generosity.

According to Kazmark, Kickstarter has been around for 2 ½ years and has sponsored 40 thousand creative projects of which 17 thousand successfully reached their funding goals. Ten percent of the films at the Sundance Film Festival this year were Kickstarter projects.

But Kickstarter isn’t just about film.

“About every week another $2 million is pledged to projects across the site. So there’s a lot of great things coming out of the site across the world: film, photography, dance, design, food, music, technology,” Kazmark said.

For creative types, like it or not, Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing funding platform.

That means a project creator has to go to the site and state up front what they’d like to accomplish and how much money they need to make it happen. They also must decide how long they have to raise the funds. The Kickstarter parameters are between 1 and 60 days.

Pirate Jenny director Romeo Brooks chose 40 days to raise $20,000.

“If they reach that goal in 40 days then that money comes to them and they get to move forward with the project. All of the backers, the people who pledge money to the project, they pledge the money in exchange for something. But their credit cards aren’t charged until two things happen, one,  the full amount of money the Pirate Jenny project creators decided they need was met, two the deadline is met,” Kazmark said.

If the project gets fully funded Kickstarter will apply a 5% fee to the amount raised. That’s how they pay for the staff and how the business continues to run.

That’s the “all” part. What about the nothing?

“After 40 days if they are even one dollar short. If they only raise $19,999 then nobody’s credit cards are charged and everyone walks away like nothing happened,” said Kazmark.

(For a first hand account of the Kickstarter experience, the good, the bad, and the ugly, click here.)

So while Velasco, a 2006 graduate of Canyon High School, waits the next 37 days for potential finishing funds for Pirate Jenny, she’s not sitting idle.

“Since Pirate Jenny, I was in an episode of Modern Family. That was pretty cool. I’ve done a lot of commercials. That’s kind of like my bread and butter right now,” said Velasco.

She has Spanish-language commercials for Chevy and McDonalds airing now and a Coca-Cola commercial airing later this month. She also acted in an Xbox promo for the People’s Choice Awards, with Two and a Half Men star Angus T. Jones. That promo can be seen by clicking here.

The video trailer for Pirate Jenny can be seen on Kickstarter by clicking here.

Velasco is represented by Cunningham Escott Slevin Doherty (CESD) Talent Agency in Los Angeles.

Canyon Country Actress Myrna Velasco Looks To Kickstart Career With Kickstarter.com

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