Five Plus Six Successfully Funded on Pledge Music

I’m excited to say that this past week saw the successful completion of another crowdfunding project I have been involved with.  Five Plus Six is a new jazz band put together by local trumpet player, Vance Thompson (See the family resemblance? Me either, he is in fact my brother though).   Vance has been leading the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra for over 15 years, and as he explains in the video, has been inspired by the young talent in the area that have gotten involved.  This inspiration led him to start Five Plus Six as a means to focus directly on those younger players, and to try out some musical ideas that might not fly with his more traditional jazz band efforts.

Five Plus Six managed to raise 104% of its financial goals using the popular musical crowd-funding site, Pledge Music.  Overfunding is always a blessing, and Vance intends to donate a portion of the excess to both Knoxville Jazz Orchestra and Knoxville Jazz Youth Orchestra.  The Youth Orchestra is a honors band for regional middle and high school students, from which two of the Five Plus Six members got their start in the local jazz community.  Supporting arts in the community and investing in the lives of the next generation is definitely something I can get behind!

We approached this crowdfunding project a little differently than the last project on KickStarter.  Instead of just making one video with two endings (one for Kickstarter and one for the would-be website), we made the initial “pitch” video, followed by a series of spots focusing on individual band members.  Several of the members have interesting stories which we wanted to share with project supporters as exclusive content.  People considering joining the financial support team could see the first 30 seconds of all the videos as “teaser” content.  In addition to the videos I shot and produced, Vance also created a series of funny videos, outlining some of the more humorous aspects of leading bands such as this, and poking fun at a few of the band members.  All in all I really liked this strategy as you could see the needle move a little bit more each time new content dropped.  Different donors seemed to connect with the different band members, which I found to be really cool.

Below you can see the series of videos we produced for the Five Plus Six project.  I would again like to give a shout out to my friend Colby McLemore for his assistance on this project!

–Dan Thompson