Adam Shell Pursues Happiness with Crowdfunding & Social Media
We as a society spend millions of dollars a year in search of happiness, whether it's from the clothes we wear, the places we travel, or the technology we use. But how much power and influence does a positive mind have over happiness? Documentarian Adam Shell (“Put the Camera on Me” and “Finding Kraftland”) wanted to know the answer - so he asked.
The end result was his latest documentary, "Pursuing Happiness", which was made over the course of two years with crowdfunding and social media as the source of the production budget and film's content.
He recently answered a few questions about how crowdfunding and social media worked for his film and describes more of the film content as well.
About crowdfunding and social media:
ProductionHUB: How big of a factor was money?
Adam Shell: Huge. Films can’t get made without money. And they aren’t cheap endeavors.
PH: Why did you choose to use crowdfire for funding? Were you denied money from investors?
Adam Shell: We used kickstarter for a couple of reasons. One was we viewed it as a chance to raise the funds we needed to shoot the film. But equally important it was a network building tool that was truly what made this film possible. The idea for this film revolved around traveling the country looking for the happiest people in America. I knew that just knocking on random peoples doors and asking them if they were happy wasn’t going to be all that interesting or get me what I wanted. Kickstarter enabled us to obtain referrals for people all over the country that were that happiest people someone knew. We literally got hundreds of referrals for happy people and the film represents what we found. We actually never even approached investors for this project it was literally all about crowd funding from the beginning.
PH: Would you have been able to make this movie if crowdfire did not exist?
Adam Shell: Yes certainly. This film would have gotten made for sure. IT would have been a different film of course but I do think we would have been able to achieve something similar to what we did. It might have taken more work and time but it would have gotten done. And for that we would have had to approach investors first.
PH: To who would you recommend this resource to? Future young documentary makers?
Adam Shell: I think Kickstarter and other crowd funding resources are fabulous tools. Though I do remind people all the time it is not any easier than getting investors on board. It takes a great deal of work to run a successful campaign. For 30 days or whatever the length of your campaign you have to live breath and sleep the campaign. And you have to prepare really well for it as well. I think you have to be really clear about what you need and want and what you current resources are and that will dictate wether or not crowd funding is a good idea.
PH: What kind of response do you think you would have gotten with fundraising if the topic of the documentary wasn't happiness?
Adam Shell: Here is the thing about social media, it has the power to reach a target audience really easily. There is a audience out there for pretty much anything. You just have to get your campaign in front of them. Interested people will often share it with their communities and so on. The thing to remember though is as much as you are selling an idea for a film or product or whatever you are also selling yourself. You have to let your potential funders feel confident in you and that you will get the job done. I have seen all kinds of documentaries on a wide variety of topics have successful campaigns. So I would like to think that if I were making a film on something other than happiness I would be successful as well.
PH: Will it be easier to fundraise money for any movie concerning happiness since the success of your movie has blazed the trail?
Adam Shell: I would love to think of myself as a trail blazer and my biggest wish is that more film on happiness get made. We need more happiness in the world. Like I said before though you have to have a good campaign. It is rare that things get funded just based on the topic. The thing about fund raising for a film is that the campaign video will let the audience know what kind of film maker you are. If you make a crappy campaign video they will likely think you will make a crappy movie.
PH: We live in a society of technology, what is the future of social media? Will there be a point where documentary makers can simply get support through likes on FB?
Adam Shell: Oh I could pontificate on social media and it’s possible futures all day but I will spare you on my theories. If you could turn likes into cash that would be awesome. I think the technology will definitely evolve to a place where people can like something and it somehow generates funding or something that can be exchanged for funding like sponsorships. Lets face it though we already do kind of live in that world. If you get a ton of likes on FB that does have tremendous marketing power and as we know marketing is expensive so I definitely think there is value in FB likes.
About "Pursuing Happiness"
PH: What was the biggest lesson you learned from each person you interviewed?
Adam Shell: We interviewed over 400 people making this film so citing what I learned from each person is a little difficult and I think it would get a little boring. But I can tell you a about a few of my favorites. Lets start with Gloria Borges who at 28 years old was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. To most people this would be the worst thing that could possibly happen. But not Gloria. Gloria took this as an opportunity to reinvent herself and her life. She says in the film "Cancer is not going to ruin my life, in fact I am going to make it the best thing that ever happened to me.” And she did. She started a blog talking very frankly about her experience and how her positivity shaped her reality. She helped thousands of fellow cancer patients see things a different way and better their lives. She was one of the happiest and most positive people I ever met. She accomplished all this through sheer will, by deciding what she wanted and going and getting it. People often tell me that you have to choose to be happy, it a kind of a cliche you can’t avoid when asking questions about how people find true happiness. The truth is though as much of a cliche as it is it is real. Sometimes it is the little choices we make and sometime they are big choices but they are choices and we do get to make them.
This closely relates to something I learned in another interview we did with life coach and author Gary Van Wamerdam. He said that your expression is your experience. I quickly interpreted that as something my parents always said to me as a kid, what you give is what you get. But in fact what he was saying was quite different. He said that you don’t have to actually wait for something to to come back to you when you put it out in the world. What you put out in the world is your experience as you put it out there, so if you express love you feel that love you are expressing and likewise with hate and fear and anger. I had never really thought of it like that before but it is really true. For me that comes back to the choice thing because we all have the ability to chose how we express ourselves in any given moment and if we can be present enough and aware enough to choose to express ourselves relative to how we want to feel I think happiness is something that we can all achieve very easily.
PH: How did you choose your subjects? In the bio for the movie it explains how you chose people whom were "happy," how did you judge these people to be happy?
Adam Shell: I actually worried about the the most at the beginning of the project. How do you find truly happy people? I feared I would have to wade through a lot of people and then come up with some method for judging people and declaring some happy and some not as happy. The funny thing is that in the end it turned out to be the easiest part. We stumbled on to something that proved to be far easier and a lot more accurate. We simply asked other people to refer us to the happiest person they know. That proved to be the best filter. I think that when people really think about happiness, whether or not they think they are achieving it themselves at that moment, we all can somehow identify it in other people we know. We got so many incredible referrals.
PH: Were you happy before this documentary or did you learn how to be from your subjects?
Adam Shell: I have always liked to think of myself as a pretty happy person. Now that is not to say that I haven't had some dark times. What I learned more than anything is how to navigate those dark times. Those are going to exist and I think it is really easy to get sucked into a pattern of negative thinking. Achieving happiness is much like physical fitness, you have to consciously work on it. The real value was the examples given by the happiest people we met. The tips and trick and the real world experiences, that is what sticks with me.
PH: Everyone has a different definition of what happiness is. If you had to create a standard definition for everyone, what would it be?
Adam Shell: My answer to that is right there in the first part of this question. Fact is that like you said everyone has a different definition of what happiness is. I don't think that is because no one has every really been able to define it in certain terms acorss the human spectrum. It is an emotional experience. And just like achieving true love is different for each and everyone of us so is achieving happiness. I can tell you this though, to quote Rick Foster, happiness exists for reason - Survival. We are a clan species and our survival depends on us working together. Happiness is the reward we get for doing things that strengthen our clans. That is why it always feels good and makes people happy when they are helping other people.
PH: Besides the video series using uncut footage, what is the future for this project?
Adam Shell: The film is out in theatrical distribution now and will be coming out on DVD and VOD later in the fall. I do hope to find a cool fun way of distributing the rest of the footage that didn’t make it in the film . There are so many amazing and lovable characters that we just couldn’t fit in. So if nothing else they will appear at some point on pursuinghappiness.com. But I have always thought though, that my work was incomplete. Even though we interviewed 400+ people, we didn’t even get to about 300 other people we got referrals for, and that is not to mention the people we got referred to after we stopped filming. Maybe we will get to those other 300 people and more.
PH: What advice would you give any aspiring documentary maker/someone in pursuit of happiness?
Adam Shell: I think the best advice is that you have to do what you love to do. If you spend your time doing things you don’t enjoy that won’t bring happiness. As for documentary film makers I’d say make a film about happiness. That will certainly make you happy. But seriously make films about things that inspire you. When you are inspired you do your best work. I guess that pretty much goes for anything really.
PH: The biography mentioned that you think tragedy and happiness coexist, which one is more valuable to you?
Adam Shell: I can’t say that one is more valuable because they both have great value to learning what life is all about. I would say I would rather be happy of course. I think that the real trick is learning how to manage those tragedies so you can achieve happiness. The line between tragedy and happiness is just that a simple line, and if you can manage your expectations, your fears, and your desires you can begin to learn how to control that line.
PH: "In any tragedy, you're half away to happiness"- how do you know you've reached happiness after the tragedy? Is it simply not being in the tragedy anymore?
Adam Shell: I am not really sure you ever get out of a tragedy. Look if something happens to you like what happened to Gloria who at 28 learned she had stage 4 colon cancer - that is not going to go away. That doesn't’ mean she has to live in misery because of it though. And she is the living proof of that. She said something very poignant. She said she hates it when people talk about someone who dies young saying that their life was cut short. As if we are all guaranteed 80 years or something. Her point was that every day is another day in our lives and we have no idea how many we get, so make the best of each day, and appreciate each and every day.
PH: Do you believe people live their entire lives trying to find happiness through spending, but never reach it? Or are they people in a tragedy trying to find the light of happiness?
Adam Shell: We live in a capitalist society. We chase money. That is what we do and there is no changing that. However we do live under this false pretense that it will bring us true happiness. It will provide fun, and excitement and opportunity like nothing else but happiness not necessarily. Happiness can be achieved at any level of monetary stature. We spoke with Professor Norton at Harvard he studies the relationship between happiness and money and he has found that what you do with your money is the the only way to have achieve happiness with money. And in that the same happiness can be achieved with out money. So yes I don believe that we live under this false pretense that happiness will bring us money, because that is what we are told, but that is what keeps us wanting more and that is how our society runs. Money, it does make the world go rounds but it rarely leave happiness in it’s wake.
About Adam Shell & Pursuing Happiness
They say that cleanliness is next to godliness – but in the United States anyway, perhaps our most divine and inspiring pursuit is that of happiness. It’s written into our Declaration of Independence, and we hear about the value of happiness from all quarters, from Judy Garland (“Come on, Get Happy!”) to Charlie Brown (“Happiness is a Warm Puppy”) to Pharrell Williams. But while we hold happiness as a golden ideal, so many of the stories we tell are about people who are never happy: politicians on the news, populations in rebellion, parents afraid of the world their children are growing up in.Filmmaker Adam Shell, who made the acclaimed show biz documentary biographies “Put the Camera on Me” (2003) and “Finding Kraftland” (2007), says that the gap between our desire for happiness and our failure to find actual examples of happiness was the impetus for his documentary “Pursuing Happiness,” which has earned audience and critical acclaim at film festivals and will be released in theatres and VOD later this year. “The premise behind the project is that we were trying to do something that’s lacking in our society,” he explains, citing that Americans spend ten billion dollars a year in “happiness” based products, therapies, and services, with seemingly little to show for it. Where were the happy people, Adam wondered? How did they achieve this much desired but rarely seen trait? What were their secrets? With friend and colleague Nicholas Kraft on board as producer, Shell knew that his project would need to take him to people and places far afield from his base in Los Angeles.
Seeing how smaller independent projects were now getting funding through crowdsourcing and social media, they decided to do a simple proof-of- concept trailer that they could then use to solicit donations. “We started out with the happiest people that we knew,” Shell explains, saying that the first interviews took them to Portland (Kraft’s hometown), and allowed them to connect with colleagues and some happiness “experts” in Northern California. But the key figure was a friend of Shell’s wife Carla Christofferson – a woman named Gloria Borges, one of the central figures in “Pursuing Happiness,” a dynamo of energy and positivity who is battling cancer with defiance and humor. “We met so many amazing people,” Shell remembers, “and with the video we put together we knew we had something people would respond to.”
And respond they did. The response on Kickstarter was not only a matter of finding money to pay for the production, but it allowed Shell and Kraft to get answers to the question “who is the happiest person that you know?” The leads pointed them all over the country. “It’s nice to do something positive, and that’s what drew people to it, what became infectious about it,” the director explains. “This isn’t a documentary about a competition or about who is screwing things up – those kinds of stories are necessary and some good can come of that, of course. But sometimes it’s nice not to dwell on the negative – people knew from the beginning that they were supporting and were going to watch something fun and positive and enjoyable.”
Over the course of nearly two years, Shell and Kraft put the pieces of the film together, from interviewing over a dozen experts in the fields of psychology, spirituality, mindfulness, and the arts, to going on the road to track down America’s happiest people. After their initial shorter jaunt up the California coast to Oregon, Kraft and Shell had two more long road trips, eventually sharing over 7000 miles of road together. One trip took them from Boston to St. Louis (“a very, very curvy line,” Shell explains), the second from Oklahoma City to Miami, with stops in big cities and small towns all along the way. The people they find are as diverse and complex and as ordinary as one might imagine – street artists, public officials, parents – just regular folks who for whatever reason are a center of joy and meaning for everyone around them.
But each of the figures in “Pursuing Happiness” emerges as far more than examples of how to have a good attitude, and ultimately Shell found himself telling a slightly different story than the one he intended. “From the beginning, my mindset was that this was only going to be about happy people – all sugar and candy, everyone out there who is just really, really happy.
Some people said, ‘don’t you want to find people who have struggled to find happiness?’ - and I was against that because I had this different vision.”
As he started putting footage together, however – and trying to tell the complete story of the lives of his subjects – Shell started to see things differently. “After a very early screening for friends, someone asked me, ‘do we need to experience tragedy to experience happiness?’ I had thought that those were just emotions or moods – but I started to realize that the answer was yes.
If you’re a human being and you feel, you’re going to experience both. In any tragedy, you’re halfway to happiness: if you’re not experiencing one, you’re not really experiencing the other – the two are pretty much impossible to separate.”
The end result is a documentary that is not only uplifting and affirmative as Shell intended, but also poignant and brutally honest in examining the delicate balance between profound happiness and mournful sorrow. And the message is resonating, as audiences have responded to the film with great enthusiasm and a desire to see more. “The coolest things that have happened just seemed to happen because they were right for the project,” Shell says.
“From meeting so many amazing people, to appearing on ‘The Today Show,’ or appearing at the UN as part of the International Day of Happiness – it was part of another lesson I learned, to follow every lead, to just put questions out there and see what the response was.” With hundreds of interviews and footage that didn’t make the final cut of the documentary, Shell is working on developing the remaining material into a video series, and hopes that his quest of pursuing happiness will never end. “People are getting something really good out of this!”
