The shoot commenced March 25th for subjects Alexandra Liss and David Vega. Singaporean subjects, Val and Tay began their journey over a year ago and plan to travel for another four years. The locations for the shoots for Val and Tay are Singapore, Taiwan, and througout Latin America. For David, Arizona, California, New York, Brasil, South America and Nevada. For Alexandra, California, SE Asia, Southern Africa, Europe, South America, and Nevada.

Editing will co-inside with the shoot, however, the fine tune editing begins from September 6th until it is complete as well as Film Festival applications,  distribution,  press, and second round of funding. Ideally we would like the film to be finished before 2011 ends.

 

Currently, we are funded by seed money from a www.kickstarter.com campaign for $7,995 which is being used for equipment such as hard-drives, camera, fed ex, subjects, design, and editing/post production. We also plan to seek more funding during post production when needed. Each subject is funding out own travel, however we are looking for people to donate/sponsor flight miles to subsidize some of the travel costs.

Although the production value and high caliber of crew is extremely high and would normally cost thousands of dollars -- We are CouchSurfers who are donating our time and expertise for a project we believe in. We seriously have some of the best in the business working on this project.

 

The current subjects are San Franciscan Director of this film, Alexandra Liss, Singaporean co-subjects Val and Tay, and now protege/DP David Vega.

The idea for the film came about by Alexandra after amazing CS experiences and proposing the idea to CouchSurfing.com founder, Casey Fenton. The idea got approval from the Collective and was given seed money. The idea was that there would be 3-4 subjects with compelling life missions that utilized CouchSurfing.com as a platform to fulfill their missions.

Initially Alexandra wanted the subjects to be chosen through a CS website which allowed CSers to send it videos and vote on the best mission. Due to resources being limited, the website was unable to be completed by CS and the project was moved to the back-burner. Three years later, with renewed ambition, Alexandra decided to move forward with the project by amending her original idea of requiring the CS community to choose the subjects and instead find the subjects by creating a promo video/kickstarter campaign.

This idea was wildly successful and thousands of interested contributors came flooding in. It is very important to represent the ethos of the CouchSurfing spirit in this film and in doing so, am amazing Crew has formed.

 

 

The simple answer to a complex situation is: no. Technically, this is an independent project. However, CouchSurfing.com did once endorse the film, since the inception of the film 3 years ago, a lot of changes have been made within the organization, which does not allow them to endorse any independent film at this time. We are in communication with CouchSurfing.org and are keeping them appraised of developments.

 

The term "One Couch at a Time" is a service mark owned by CouchSurfing International, Inc., and used by us under license.

Additionally in the eyes of the organization Couchsurfing.org, this documentary is unofficial. Couchsurfing.org has had no role in the making of this documentary and none of the material have been contributed by, reviewed, or approved by Couchsurfing.org.

Shipping to Australia and Asia usually takes 7-14 days.