There is a specific feeling that comes with yet another funding rejection. It sits somewhere between heartburn, grief and apathy, with a top note of "I should have been a dentist." You are not surprised, exactly, because you have done this enough times to know the odds. But you are still a little surprised, because you genuinely believe in this one. You know how good it is. You know how badly you, as an audience member, would want to watch it. You have massaged the budget until you can quote the numbers in your sleep. You have re-written the synopsis until it sings. And now you are looking at a polite email and wondering whether to bury the project in the backyard like the Jumanji board, which is, in fact, exactly what the creators of The Witchy Girls said they wanted to do after their very first rejection.

Cut to now: we didn't bury it. We made it anyway. And the way we made it is what I want to talk about this month, because I think it might be useful to some of you. (And if it isn't, hopefully the jokes about drag queens and air conditioning will see you through).

The car ride that became a production model

The origin story is almost annoyingly cinematic. Robbie Sinclair-Ten Eyck (better known as Lazy Susan, fresh off winning Drag Race Down Under Season 4) was in a car with comedian Rhys Nicholson and Kyran Nicholson, the Creative Director of Comedy Republic. They were on the way to film Drag Race Down Under vs The World when Annie and I had to call with the news that another funding application had gone sideways.

After we hung up, Kyran asked Robbie a very simple question: if television funding wasn't going to back this, why not fund it the way drag and comedy have always been funded, by putting audiences in a room first?

That question became our production model. Iris Arc Pictures partnered with Comedy Republic to build a live-first launch: a season of ticketed screening events at Comedy Republic and a pink-carpet premiere at The Capitol Theatre, where audiences could see the episodes alongside live companion performances from cast members and the Witchy Girls themselves, Lazy Susan and Zelda Moon. Ticket sales and merchandise were to subsidise production. Comedy Republic match-funded what we had already raised as a distribution guarantee. And during the live run episodes drop weekly on Comedy Republic's YouTube channel, where it can travel beyond Melbourne and find the global audience we made it for.

You didn't wait for permission. Cool. Now do twice the work.

I want to be honest with you, a live-first model is not a shortcut. We essentially signed up for two productions running in parallel. And that is not for the feint of heart.

We made an entire television series, with all the post and VFX and colour and sound that entails. At the same time, we had to produce a live theatre season. Fortunately for us, drag queens are live event experts and Comedy Republic is second to none in this department. But you are still talking about venue logistics, run sheets, special guest wrangling, merch tables, front of house, 7 foot tall custom VHS tapes for the media wall, lighting and sound design for the live shows, rehearsals, and a creative team holding all of it in their heads at once while also editing the show that is screening that week.

You also wear the financial risk. If tickets don't sell, that's on you, because the series is already shot and you’re already wearing those invoices. There is no broadcaster or distributor underwriting the gap. You are the broadcaster now. Congratulations. Please double down on those spreadsheet skills.

So why do it? Because the advantages are extraordinary, and they are advantages you simply cannot buy with a funding grant.

You build an audience before episode one drops. By the time we release it online, we already have hundreds of people who have seen the show in a packed theatre, screamed with laughter at Rhys Nicholson’s cameo, and walked out hungry for more. Those people aren't viewers. They are cheerleaders. They post photos with the characters. They tag the socials. They text their friends. They are doing the marketing job that, on a traditional production, you'd pay an agency to attempt with a fraction of the passion.

You also get something rarer than money: proof of demand. A funding body can tell you no a hundred times, but they cannot argue with a sold-out room. Our premiere sold out. Our second screening sold out. Our third screening sold out. We are putting on an encore. I could stop bragging now. But I won’t. We pulled off something extraordinary.

Producing on a budget below nothing: a practical aside

But before we go any further into philosophy, let me give you the actually useful bit. Here is what I learned about running a micro-budget shoot that doesn't fall apart.

Pick where to spend, and spend there properly. You do not have a lot of money, so be honest about your priorities. For me, it is always food. If people feel nurtured and cared for, they will go further for you. A great catering line item costs you less than the goodwill it buys, and people remember it.

Get a brilliant AD. Nothing zaps goodwill faster than running overtime. An AD who can keep your days on track is, mathematically, the cheapest insurance policy you will ever buy. Pay them what they're worth (thank you for volunteering Hayden we love you!) and listen when they push back on you.

Be ruthlessly honest about your crew list. Who can you genuinely call in a favour from, and who would feel taken advantage of if you asked? Those are very different categories and they should be treated very differently. Confusing one for the other is how relationships get burned and reputations get earned (the wrong kind).

Hard drives. Has anyone else noticed how expensive hard drives are right now? I am not joking. They are absurd. If anyone reading this works in storage and would like to do indie filmmakers a solid, please slide into our DMs. We are begging. The Australian screen industry will name a child after you.Prepare to wear many many hats. Not metaphorical hats. Real ones, in the sense that you will be doing real jobs that are not your job. You are an excellent producer. You are also, as of now, a runner, a set painter, a music licensing expert, a background extra, a merch packer and, probably someone's emotional support animal. The budget gap doesn't disappear. It gets redistributed across your and your team's increasingly tired bodies. The upside is that you come out the other side knowing exactly how every department works, which makes you a significantly better producer. The downside is that you will not remember the month of January 2025.

Build a contingency line for the unhinged. There will be costs that show up out of nowhere. On our shoot, the studio we were using did not have air conditioning, and one day landed at over 45 degrees Celsius, and we had drag queens padded to the nines who were, understandably, threatening mutiny. We rented an emergency AC unit. We stocked up on Hydralyte and icy poles. Build the contingency line in advance, because the day will come.

Be at peace with the fact you may not make your money back. Sit with that, properly, before you start. What you are investing personally, professionally, financially and emotionally, does it sit well with you? Because what you are doing, in the most literal sense, is gambling. The pay-off is the show existing in the world. If that pay-off is enough for you, you are ready. If it isn't, find a different model or a different project. Both are fine answers.

On the cheap, fast, good matrix

There's an old industry rule: cheap, fast, good. Pick two. You cannot have all three.

I want to make a slightly heretical argument, which is that we have, in a very specific way, circumvented this matrix. Not by magic. (Or maybe by magic. The show is about witches. I make no promises.) We just paid in a different currency.

Every single person on this production, including our extraordinary cast, donated their time. Hannah Gadsby, Alaska Thunderf*ck, Geraldine Hickey, Rhys Nicholson, Ella Hooper, Nina Oyama, Genevieve Morris, and many more, they all said yes for the same reason the crew did: they believed in the project. As Zelda Moon (Kane Bonato) told ArtsHub, "It was insane how many people have come to the table to make this super low budget, very silly thing look far more expensive and overqualified than it is."

I want to be precise about what is actually happening here, because pretending the triangle disappeared isn't useful to anyone reading this. We didn't cheat the matrix. We paid in goodwill instead of cash, and we honoured that by guarding quality with our lives. Our post-production team has worked their asses off to meet tight deadlines without compromising on craft. We have refused, at every junction, to let "scrappy" become an excuse for "sloppy."

Which brings me to the most important point in this blog. The most powerful currency you have, particularly early in your career, is not money. It is your network, your reputation, and yes, your vibes. The way people feel after working with you. The way you treat a runner. The way you pay your invoices. The way you credit your collaborators publicly. Whether you show up the way you said you would. That is the currency that lets you call in a favour like this one, and it is the only currency that compounds. Spend it well.

The crew, and the people who held this thing together

I want to name some people, because this blog would be a fraud without it.

Our director Haley Alea Erickson (who has the award-winning Call Me Mommy on her reel and somehow agreed to direct this anyway), our head of hair, make-up and chief of good vibes Sam Pearce, our first AD Hayden Mustica, and our Director of Photography Michael Lincoln were just some of the HODs who carried the production. Tight schedule, ambitious vision, complicated practical and visual effects (we have a sentient computer with Alaska Thunderfuck's face on an iPad, just so you know what we were asking people to do), and they delivered. Sean McGlynn on lighting, Ramon Watkins editing, CJ Dobson on colour and Sugarcoat Studios on VFX, and this is only naming a few. Please read the credits of this show very closely. Every name on that list is an absolute star, and there is no praise generous enough and no gratitude deep enough to come close to how we feel about them. Every single one brought a level of craft to this project that, on paper, our budget did not deserve.

And of course my Iris Arc team, Annie Thiele and Katie Page. Without you, nothing exists. And the creators of this show, Robbie and Kane. How you do what you do is genuinely beyond me.

If you take one thing from this blog, take this: the names on your crew list are the real show. Look after them, because they look after you.

Bespoke tarot cards and the economics of merch

Here is something I didn't fully appreciate before we started: in a live-first model, merch is not a souvenir. It is part of the funding stack.

We are very blessed that Robbie is also an incredible designer and a mad scientist when it comes to merch and because of that, we made the call early on to produce bespoke, hand-crafted merchandise rather than slap a logo on a t-shirt. (We also did the t-shirt. We are not monsters.) The centrepiece is a custom-illustrated Witchy Girls tarot deck that celebrates the characters and key moments from the series. There is also a digital tarot reading on the website, built by a true html wizard. It is silly, it is gorgeous, and people are losing their minds over it.

Merch as an art object, not afterthought, is something I will be carrying into every project from here on. It is also a reminder that, as producers, we have to think outside the box about how audiences can engage with our work beyond what's on the screen. Yes, you wear the cost of merchandise upfront. But if you do it right, people genuinely want to support you, and merch is one of the ways they can own a piece of the world you've built.

Why this show, why now

I would happily make the cynical case for The Witchy Girls. Australian comedy is (mostly) always good. Drag Race alumni come with a built-in audience. Nostalgia for 90s teen-witch television is sitting right there waiting to be picked up. It is, frankly, a sensible commercial proposition disguised as a deeply unserious one.

But the honest reason I want this show in the world is simpler than that. People are tired. The news is bleak. And there is something genuinely curative about watching two awful teenage witches refuse to learn a single lesson while they battle a singing STD, the Millennium Bug, and the most popular girl at school. Silliness is not a lesser register. Joy is not a lesser register. Nostalgia, when it isn't lazy, is a way of telling people that the things they loved as kids were worth loving, and that they are safe to love them again.

I think we need this kind of thing more than we admit.

The bit where I ask you to do something

If you're in Melbourne, the final screening is on 28 May (with rumours rumbling of an encore screening which I am not able to disclose at this very moment) at Comedy Republic. Tickets, the tarot deck and the rest of the merch are at thewitchygirls.com.

If you're anywhere else in the world, episodes are rolling out free on Comedy Republic TV on YouTube, and you can follow @thewitchygirls on Instagram to keep up.

Watch it. Share it. Comment on it. Tell someone about it at 3am at a party. Reveal your tarot fate. That is, genuinely, the distribution plan.

And if you are sitting on a project right now, watching your fifth funding email come back with a no, I'd offer this. Your project doesn't need permission. It needs a room, an audience, and a network of people who will back you when you ask. Find a different way in. If you love it enough, if you feel strongly enough about it, you can make it happen. No one is coming to your door with a silver platter offering you the opportunities of a lifetime. You have to create the opportunity. You have to barge through the door yourself and declare that you are here, and you are making something people want to see.

We did. And honestly, it turns out the door wasn't even locked.

Let's hear your thoughts in the comments below!

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