Marie-France Roy Needs Your Help To Finish Her Epic Enviro-Shred Flick "The Little Things" - Find Out About The Project And How You Can Help

The Little Things movie is a two-year passion project by top-tier professional snowboarder Marie-France Roy that aims to bring home an environmental message through the telling of some unique stories in the snowboarding world. After filming groundbreaking video parts for close to a decade, Marie-France decided it was time to follow her dream and along with filmmaker Darcy Turenne has been working hard to complete the project by Fall 2014. 
 

Like many things in life, filmmaking is a hard feat - and in Marie-France's words, "Most snowboard films have each rider contributing a portion of the budget. This film is financed just by me!" Ie. The time has come to appeal to the world for one last infusion of money so that the film can be completed as it's intended. So to Kickstarter they've turned and while they are on track to reach their goal of $25,000, they could use all the help they can get. 

Check their beautiful Earth Day Trailer:

We believe that instead of preaching or pointing the finger at what people are doing wrong, we should focus on all The Little Things that people are doing right depending on their own assets and situations. Those simple and positive actions eventually influence our family, our friends, our children and essentially our political leaders to make the major changes that we need on a bigger scale.

This film is about riders who have adopted different lifestyles or have gone off the beaten path in order to promote change in their own unique and different ways. [..] Through their stories, we hope to showcase what each of them are doing personally to help secure the same lifestyle and quality of life that we have for the future generations.

I decided to find out more first-hand from Marie-France and she was kind enough to provide us some more info on the project and the Kickstarter campaign.

What happened happened to the original budget? Was this an anticipated need or did something unforeseen happen?

To tell you the truth, one of the aspects I am the most proud of about this film is that none of the riders involved needed to bring money in order to be featured, which also explains why it has been challenging to get even a fraction of most movie budgets.  In all major action sport films, unless they are made by one single company or brand, each rider needs to be able to bring major financial contribution from their own sponsors just to have the opportunity to be in the film. I didn't want to have to deal with that kind of politics for The Little Things so all the funding comes from my own sponsors (thanks to Oakley, ClifBar, Redbull, Rome Snowboards, Axis Boardshop, Whistler Blackcomb, Goal Zero, Ema) as well as a lot of my personal savings. This way, we have been able to feature more underexposed riders with incredibly inspiring stories and lifestyle alongside some of the best riders in the world like Gretchen and Jeremy all in the same film with no financial favoritism. I approached each rider individually to ask them if they wanted to be involved and they all went out of their way to give us the time and energy to make it happen.

Where did the idea for doing a kickstarter campaign come from? 

We knew we would probably need more funding since our budget was really small and we all know that making movies costs a lot of money.  Crowd sourcing seemed like the best way for us to promote the cause while getting people to be involved with their extra support. We are open to additional sponsors too if the right opportunities arise but it just isn't that easy these days, especially with a taboo subject like Climate Change. 

On top of that, we really aren't trying to make money off this film, 100% of the sales are going to Protect Our Winters and The David Suzuki Foundation by personal choice. It's another reason why we need that extra funding since we won't recover production costs from sales. Everyone involved has been so generous though and working for way less than what they deserve. Darcy Turenne, the Director, editor is a good friend and her talent and creative style was a must for the project. I feel so fortunate that she joined me on this journey, the whole project wouldn't be nearly as amazing without her. Chelsea Waddell and Natalie Langmann  have also been incredibly helpful and supportive, I can't thank them enough. We always wanted male riders in the film but we do feel very proud that our whole production team is all women too.
 

What happens if you don't reach your goal?

Ha! well, we really hope we do! Asking for money or favours has never been something I like to do.... but since it is for such an important cause, we hope everyone can contribute whatever they can or even just to share our Kickstarter page and spread the word is amazingly helpful to us. Every little bit helps! I like the Kickstarter format too because everyone gets a really rad choice of rewards at very affordable prices I think so it is not as painful as giving money with nothing in return at least. Make sure to check it out and share to your friends please!

Now that you've wrapped principal cinematography, how are you feeling about the project? 

I feel like this is gonna be a really different and creative film and I hope people get inspired positively from it. There is still so much to be done though, Darcy will be working really hard all summer editing it all. I have learned so much in the last two years, so much work goes into making movies! From distribution, to clearing music rights, gathering footage of other riders, preparing a premier tour... I'm glad I did it because I admire what all filmmakers, filmers, directors and producers do a lot more now!

Judging by your teasers, especially the latest one featuring none other than David Suzuki, I think it's safe to say you guys have built up some pretty good hype and expectations. Are you feeling the pressure, haha? 

ha! Well we are gonna do our best and I think it will be positive no matter what. We really hope to bring this film to a broader audience too since everyone can relate to it. Even people who don't know much about snowboarding can appreciate the message and cinematography and hopefully it will inspire them to snowboard or get closer to nature. We mainly hope that people can feel empowered and focus on  the possibilities of what they can do instead of feeling guilty about what they aren't able do. So many inspiring and rad people gave us their time and words of wisdom to share, we have been really fortunate and it has been a really rewarding ride, that's for sure. We have been told that David Suzuki apparently gets about 200 media requests a day and he somehow accepted to speak to us, a bunch of snowboarders! ha! That's pretty amazing I think and it shows how much he believes in the power of the next generations...

Thanks so much to everyone involved and for the donations we have gotten so far. The support has been incredible and it's so refreshing to work on a project where people have to come together as a community in order to make it happen. I hope you all enjoy the film!

Find The Little Things' Kickstarter HERE and make sure to follow the project on Facebook & Tumblr