Hattie Archibald

We are over the moon that our crowdfunding campaign has reached its target. We are so grateful to our wonderful supporters. 
Our tummmies are doing backflips with excitement and sending you MUCH LOVE. 

We look forward to keeping our supporters updated as the project develops. Please feel free to get in touch with us via our Facebook Page and the Gut Feeling website that will soon be live at: http://gutfeelingfilm.com
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‘Gut Feeling’ is a comedy web series told entirely from the perspective of a tummy.

We want to make ‘Gut Feeling’ for a few very simple reasons:
1.  We want people to take a few minutes (4 minutes, precisely x 3 episodes) to stop hating their bodies, and to feel good about themselves, whatever their tummy looks like!
2.  We want the chance to become better filmmakers by challenging ourselves to try a bold concept. With tummies as the main characters, we can't rely on facial expressions to engage an audience.
3. We want to entertain you. Tummies are engaging. We want our web series to be too.

We've already shot a pilot scene for the series and now we are looking for help to fund the rest of production.

We have until the 5th of June to raise our production budget of $14,000. If we hit our goal, we'll receive the funds and will be able to shoot the series. If we don't reach our target, we won't receive any of the funds.

ABOVE: On set shooting our pilot scene (Left to right: Max McLachlan DOP, Alex Birch on sound, actor Damien Higginbotham, director Hattie Archibald and in the foreground the head of actor Bridie Connell)

ABOUT THE SERIES
‘Gut Feeling’ takes a different perspective. In the series, we see the world through the eyes (or rather, the belly button) of a young woman’s tummy. By turning bellies into characters, our intention is to encourage our audience to feel more empathy towards this often under-appreciated part of the human body. The moral of this story? Listen to your gut.

FINDING AN AUDIENCE
The belly's story will be released in short "shareable" episodes on YouTube and given to organisations who work to inspire positive body image and self-confidence. The series will also be cut together as a short film and submitted to film festivals.

SYNOPSIS
You know when you get the feeling that your gut is telling your something? ‘Gut Feeling’ is about a girl belly who falls in love with a boy belly – a fellow recruit at the local surf lifesaving club – but whose love is thwarted by her cold, image-obsessed mind. When the girl’s mind falls for a chiseled but unkind set of abs, the belly must persuade her mind to get out of the relationship with the abs and reconnect with the boy belly that gave her butterflies.

HOW CAN YOU HELP?
1. If you can, support this project with some dollars. Simply select which reward you are interested in on the column to the right, then pledge your money to the project. Your credit card will be deducted when we (hopefully!) hit our target goal. You can also opt not to receive a reward.
2. Help spread the word! Share this link http://pozi.be/gutfeeling with your friends.

If we reach our target goal, our funds will distributed across the following areas: 

CREW – token fees for our production designer, camera assistant/gaffer, DOP, 1^st AD, production coordinator and graphic designer
CAST – nominal fees for actors, supporting actors, belly dancer
PRODUCTION – camera & lighting equipment, location fees, public liability insurance, data storage, costume hire, props, catering, stills photography
POST PRODUCTION – editing, sound design, grading, additional dialogue recording, music rights, composer
MARKETING – series website, email database software, premiere

Every web series presents challenges. Organising shoot locations, coordinating crew availability, framing complicated shots, managing less-than-ideal weather on set, and so on. Fortunately our seasoned crew has had experience facing these type of challenges, and we have factored these into our production plans.

As our story is shot entirely from perspective of belly, we face a whole other range of technical and creative challenges:
- How do we engage an audience without having people’s facial expressions as the key focus?
- How do we shoot the world from the perspective of a belly, when most of the time bellies are hidden behind clothing?
- How do we convey the different 'voices' in our web series? Does the belly use one kind of voice to communicate with another belly, and another kind of voice to speak to her "landlord" (aka, her mind)?

As a team of young filmmakers, we lust for these type of challenges. To address them, we have already: 
- Shot proof-of-concept footage, including the scene you see in the trailer above. 
- Developed a script with an emphasis on comedic dialogue, rapid scene changes and musical montages. 
- Sought feedback and advice from more experienced members of the industry.

We will continue to work to address these challenges - and any others that arise.