Mike Musgrove - At Play: Kickstarter is a Web site for the starving artist - washingtonpost.com

Baltimore-based director Matt Porterfield was overjoyed to find out that his latest film was accepted by the Berlin Film Festival. But there was one not-so-trivial problem: He didn't have any money to finish the editing and sound work.

Even a plane ticket to Germany would have been out of the question for Porterfield. He had maxed out his credit cards to make "Putty Hill," a beautifully shot and largely improvised story about a group of Baltimore kids who come together to attend the funeral of a friend who died of a drug overdose...