Crowdfund This: ‘Jo and the Pirates’!

Jo and the Pirates is set to be a short film about growing up…and space pirates. Who can’t relate to that?

The project honestly sounds pretty insane (and the best ones usually do); it’s something that I can barely imagine actually watching in this day and age, which really makes me want to see it even more. Here’s a breakdown of Jo and the Pirates‘ plot:

Jo, a fourteen-year-old sarcastic tomboy lives with her foster family, which includes her foster mother Nancy, Nancy’s deadbeat but lovable brother Kyle, and two horrible foster sisters, Amber and Gina. Jo feels like a speck in a universe full of jerks, her only real friend being Corey, a kind-hearted boy who is more or less Jo’s sidekick.

On Halloween night, Jo is hiding from a bully in the woods, where she finds a strange piece of metal debris. The moment she touches it she’s teleported from the woods into the cockpit of a space ship, crewed by intergalactic pirates.

After helping the captain of the ship with a bounty hunter problem, the crew decides to take Jo with them as they blast off through space.

Basically, creator Adam Murray has spent the 1.5 years writing the project, with the full intention of selling it to a studio. Then, as often happens, he absolutely fell in love with it (and doesn’t want anyone to ruin it), so he’s planning to make it into a short film himself. Of course, he needs our help to do it!

Adam and company are shooting for a respectable $15,000, and just one day have already raised $1077, so with 39 days to go, things are looking quite good for the project. Where’s the money going? It’s all headed “towards paying the cast and crew, as well as renting equipment, locations, creating the alien crew along with their space ship.”

Now, this isn’t one of those crowdfunding projects that hits YouTube the day its finished. Jo and the Pirates will be hitting the festival circuit once finished, meaning that it can’t be publicly released online. If you want to see it (and with the team shooting for a film that feels like the Amblin movies and other films they watched growing up like The Goonies, Gremlins, E.T., ect., who doesn’t), the only way to check it out is by being a backer.

Sold? Good. There are plenty of awesome rewards available to backers, including digital copies of the films, posters, signed scripts, stickers, screen prints, producer credits, and more.

The project sounds fantastic, so take a look and the campaign video below, and head to the IndieGogo page here to back!