Gregor Schmidinger is the director of “The Boy Next Door”, a short film that garnered a whopping 2 million views in less than 3 years. Incredible success for a short film, certainly because Gregor managed to evoke a lot of emotions with the story about a male prostitute longing for real affection.

In case you have missed it, read Gregor’s great guest blog series “How to Reach a Million Video Views” in which he deals in detail with the strategy and the blueprint for a viral success such as “The Boy Next Door”.

Gregor has started a new and very ambitious short film project and it deals with something that should be taken very seriously. Recently, a series of suicides of gay teens that were subject for bullying make headlines, especially in the US.

One example is Jamey Rodemeyer, who decided to come out of the closet very publicly by putting video blogs on YouTube – the result was constant battering by others in his school, and only a short time after he posted a video in which he said that “it does get better”, he killed himself. Read the New York Times article here.

Gregor’s next short film will be called “Homophobia” and deals exactly with that subject matter, trying to raise awareness of something that you should care about regardless of your sexual preference. The fact that a significant number of young people feel forced to kill themselves because they feel that they can’t take the pressure from their environment any longer is something that needs to be taken very seriously.

I am happy to be involved as Director of Photography and I look forward to visualize the screenplay (here’s the English translation or German original) with the director.

Gregor started an Indiegogo campaign to get funding for the film, and set a rather moderate goal of just $6,000 which covers the absolutely basic costs (of course everybody works for free on this).

If you decide to become a sponsor, there are a series of perks you can get, check them out on the project website.

In case the goal is exceeded, all the additional proceeds will go to the “It Gets Better Project”:

The It Gets Better Project is a project that fights gay bullying and provides LGBT teens with a perspective that indeed “It Gets Better”. Since we fight for the same cause, we decided on this social cause. Find more information about the project on ItGetsBetter.org.

So if you can afford it and want to support an important cause and of course a very good and very well-developed script that should become a great short film, please donate on Indiegogo. The perks are also great and I will do my best to bring as much to the project as a I can – the best possible images!