Mr Biffo series smashes Kickstarter target in first 24 hours
- The crowdfunding campaign for online series Mr Biffo's Found Footage has already past £8,000 in pledges
- Created by Digitiser writer Paul Rose, the format involves creating footage that looks like archive content
- Rose says the campaign's success frees him "from playing it safe". Additional funds will allow for a special too
A crowdfunding campaign for setup to fund a new online series by Digitiser writer Paul Rose has already raised over £8,000.
Rose has turned to Kickstarter to fund Mr Biffo's Found Footage, an online series of six episodes of "utter nonsense and lunacy." He originally hoped to raise £3,500 via the site, but within the first 24 hours and with 28 days still to go on the campaign, he had already attracted over £8,000 in pledges.
Paul Rose, who has written on shows such as Boomers and CBBC sitcoms 4 O'Clock Club and Dani's Castle, often goes by the name of Mr Biffo. A generation of teenagers grew up reading work by Mr Biffo and Mr Hairs (Tim Moore) on Digitiser, the hugely popular humorous video games magazine broadcast via the Teletext television system. Rose now runs the blog digitiser2000.com.
The concept of Mr Biffo's Found Footage involves creating episodes that will purport to be compilations lifted from an archive of found footage. However, in reality almost everything is created from scratch. Rose previously piloted Biffovision, a sketch show format for BBC Three, in 2007.
The description for the new project explains: "Expect a heavy dose of nostalgia in there - albeit nostalgia as remembered though a heavily lysergic fog. There'll be snippets of old TV shows, home videos, music clips, cartoons - basically, anything goes. It'll be richly loaded with a wide variety of different content."
With the £3,500 required to have the series ready for Spring 2017 already surpassed, Rose has now released a 'stretch goal' of £13,500 which will allow a high-budget Christmas special to also be made, for December 2017.
Speaking to BCG, Rose says: "The success of the campaign so far just underlines for me how hungry people are in the UK for comedy which doesn't fit within the narrow parameters of what broadcasters are prepared to commission. The support Found Footage has received already frees me from playing it safe. I'll be able to put every penny on screen to ensure it looks as intentionally bad as possible."
Talking about the task now ahead, he adds: "If the project reaches its first stretch goal, I'll be creating a Christmas special, which will be a nightmarish trawl through an alternate universe of Christmas telly and home videos. If we go beyond that the sky's the limit; but all funds will be ploughed back into crew, equipment and studio hire, and paying cast, animators and musicians. We're doing this for real, and my ambition is to make the best show possible with whatever funds we have available; a true alternative to broadcast comedy."
To read more about the background of the project, and the aims for the series, and to pledge money to support the project in return for a reward, visit Mr Biffo's Found Footage on Kickstarter
Here is the campaign video:
And the below video, put together for a Digitiser festival, gives more of an idea of the style of comedy that will be featured in Mr Biffo's Found Footage. However, readers should note the new show "won't be all ad parodies".