Crowdfund Fridays: “The Last 40 Miles”

Texas executes more Americans than any other state in the United States, a disturbing fact that Austin-based British journalist Alex Hannaford learned when he began interviewing Texan death row inmates in 2003. Now, he has patched together a fictional animated film based loosely on those inmate interviews. The Last 40 Miles follows “a condemned man on his last trip: a ride from his solitary cell on death row to the execution chamber in a facility 40 miles away.” The film will employ a variety of drawn and digital animation styles, including rotoscoping.

Hannaford is producing the short with a trio of artists who teach at the Art Institute of Austin: Jeff Roth, Meg Mulloy and Luc Dimick. They are attempting to raise $30,000 on IndieGogo to complete the film. At the time of this writing, they had raised $18,666 with three days remaining in their campaign. Unlike Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing fundraising platform, IndieGogo offers a ‘flexible funding’ scheme, which means that even if these filmmakers don’t reach their goal, they are allowed to keep the amount they’ve raised. Texas Monthly published an interview with Hannaford last December in which he describes the genesis of the film and how they’re making it.