The official theme for their capital campaign is “#THESISWHY.”

Tired of capital campaigns yet? Too bad. Making movies is expensive, and #thisiswhy thesis filmmakers Gus Vita ’13 and Dema Paxton Fofang ’13 (otherwise known as The Artist Formerly Known as Bamenda) are asking for your help in the form of a Kickstarter and an IndieGogo campaign, respectively. Vita’s asking for $3,000 and Fofang’s asking for $1,000, which comes to $4,000 total between the two of them, which still only amounts to .016% of the budget of Michael Bay ’86’s next $25 million opus (and that’s not counting the extra millions for advertising), so throw them a bone, will you? (At any rate, both of them have raised substantial funds towards their goals as of this posting—but they need more.)

You’d be right in assuming that filming is complete for both movies, so why raise money now? As Fofang explains it, “both of our projects were shot on 16mm, and the post-production process for that format is quite expensive. I’m currently spending long hours each day editing the film on a Steenbeck, and prepping for the final stages of post-production.” A cursory glance at Fofang’s own fundraising campaign reveals in detail where the money’s going: hiring a negative cutter to assemble the final cut, hiring a professional sound mixer to optimize the soundtrack, answer prints, color correction, telecine, festival distribution fees.

Wait, festival distribution fees? For real? If you donate, that means you can take credit when one of these films becomes the next Beasts of the Southern Wild and shows up on Oprah and gets problematized by The New Republic or whatever. Click past the jump for a bit more information on both films.