BUTTER
New York City, New York | Film Short
Comedy, Satire
Ever felt invisible? Told to shrink to fit in? Whiplashed between shame and “self-love”? Butter is a darkly funny satire about the systems that profit from our insecurities. If you feel called out (or seen), help us make this film real!
BUTTER
New York City, New York | Film Short
Comedy, Satire
1 Campaigns | New York, United States
Green Light
This campaign raised $20,335 for pre-production. Follow the filmmaker to receive future updates on this project.
109 supporters | followers
Enter the amount you would like to pledge
Ever felt invisible? Told to shrink to fit in? Whiplashed between shame and “self-love”? Butter is a darkly funny satire about the systems that profit from our insecurities. If you feel called out (or seen), help us make this film real!
About The Project
- The Story
- Wishlist
- Updates
- The Team
- Community
Mission Statement
The Story
We did it! Thanks to your incredible support, Butter has officially reached 100% of our Seed&Spark goal. This film exists because of you, and we couldn’t be more grateful.
But we can't stop just yet! We’re now setting our sights on a stretch goal of $20,000. Here’s what that unlocks for us:
- Paying people closer to industry standards – In today’s tough economy, fairer pay helps us better support our talented cast & crew.
- Securing stronger locations – Expanding Butter’s world with more dynamic, cinematic spaces that elevate the story.
Every extra dollar goes directly into making the film sharper, funnier, scarier, and even more Butter-y. But first...
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Butter is a woman in her late-30s struggling to fit in the world, physically. She feels invisible, she feels shamed, she feels FAT. The worst thing a woman can be!
Fortunately, Dr. O at the Wait & Watchers clinic, has a new solution for her -- OZERO, a revolutionary new drug to help her shed that weight, literally. It doesn’t just remove your fat…. it liberates it!
Butter thus embarks on a journey to finally be hot! Drawn to the world of instant gratification and internet validation, Butter finally rakes in the chips of her skinny privileges. She gets everything she’s ever wanted: Her twin mothers’ approval, acceptance into every social group, Dr. O's clean bill of health and even respect at the gym.
Yet the “smaller” she becomes the larger the consequences start to show. As her body changes drastically, Butter has to make a choice. How small is small enough? How thin is too thin? Does one really need all those heavy limbs? Let’s ask Butter.
But wait, where’d she go? Hello??
Women’s bodies are always up for debate. Endlessly dissected or celebrated, condemned or commodified, they occupy so much of our cultural imagination that they become the ultimate battleground for control and power.
Moving through the world as a queer, fat, brown woman means I’m constantly negotiating a paradox. I push myself to take up space. Be loud. Be proud. Be big. Yet, i’m simultaneously learning and stealthily absorbing the practice of shrinking myself in order to … just belong.
My “body” of work questions: how much is too much space? Physically, emotionally, psychologically, I explore these questions through fatness. Why fatness? Because the mere existence of FAT sparks outrage. It demands to take up space as the world relentlessly conspires to erase it.
We thus explore this world through Butter’s eyes, as she guides the audience to question their own internalized ideas of beauty, shame, and visibility. Her story reminds us that if you don’t conform, the powers that be will melt you down and consume you in one satisfying gulp!
The film’s surreal and satirical tone, paired with campy visual worldbuilding, gives me the freedom to be playful as a director. Being playful with the form and content especially at a time where the “heavy” discourse is centered around dehumanization of bodies.
Playful with ideas that can grow fat without being judged.
“After all butter isn’t always bitter and Betty did buy some better butter to make the bitter batter better with more butter” - Priyanka Krishnan
Butter is set in a heightened, unsettlingly yet familiar version of New York City, where absurdity is seamlessly woven into the everyday. Love handles roll away as perfect, gleaming orbs of fat. Doctors cheerfully prescribe disappearance as the ultimate form of self-care. Friends and family call it “an incredible transformation.” Butter’s vanishing body is both a medical marvel and a social currency. The smaller she becomes, the bigger the world opens up for her, more invitations, more attention, more power.
The tone is off-kilter laced with emotional truth. The film is designed to take the audience from curiosity to discomfort. It is satire wearing a hyper-glam mask, riffing on consumerism, body politics, and the cult of self-improvement.
Its stylistic DNA draws from But I’m a Cheerleader’s artificial candy-colored worlds, Death Becomes Her’s campy body grotesque, and Brazil’s bureaucratic absurdity.
Visually, the world is a tug-of-war between external spectacle and internal reckoning:
- External: The sterile, clinical precision of the Wait & Watchers clinic, the glossy white plastics, symmetrical seating, eerily cheerful attendants contrasts with the chaotic opulence outside: paparazzi flashbulbs, Instagram livestreams, champagne towers, and money-and-sex-drenched indulgence.
- Internal: Butter’s void is an infinite black expanse punctured by harsh spotlights, flickering projections of the self, and surreal dreamscape where butter must confront her inner shadows.
In the world of Butter visibility comes at the ultimate cost where every space is a reflection of the shrinking self and in the end there’s nothing left to applaud but your absence.
We are raising funds to get this film in motion! Traditional film financing doesn't work well for shorts as there aren't a lot of distribution options so we're asking for sheer generosity and good will. Our overall budget is over the $17.5K that we're fundraising through Seed & Spark, but we've already secured a $12.5K grant to get us started!
That initial grant will let us pay for locations, equipment rentals and feeding our cast and crew (important!), but there's still many more things you can contribute to. If this campaign exceeds its goal (if we could be so lucky), funds will be routed to the post-production phase (VFX, color grading, sound design) or go towards festival submission fees so we can get this out into the world. Not a cent will be wasted!
All dollars will go to:
- Feeding our cast and crew (21% - secured through grant)
- Finding unique locations (19% - secured through grant)
- Equipment (7% - secured through grant)
- Production design, props, practical special effects (13%)
- Paying cast (9%)
- Paying crew (25%)
- Misc pre-production costs (deposits, fees, etc) (7%)
We've already moved into our pre-production phase with the funds we've already secured and are shooting this fall:
- August - October 2025 - Pre-Production (casting, locations, additional fundraising)
- November 2025 - Production (5 days of film production in NYC)
- December 2025 - Initial Edit
- January - April 2026 - Post-Production (VFX, Color Grading, Sound Design, etc)
- May 2026 - Festival Submissions + Premiere
MAKE A PLEDGE
Whether you’re a filmmaker, a film lover, or just someone who enjoys watching people literally lose their heads, we’ve got some deliciously absurd incentives waiting for you. Step into Butter’s strange, glossy world and help us make this disappearing act happen.
SPONSOR A DEPARTMENT
Peep our Wishlist and claim bragging rights for fueling the magic—whether it’s funding our prosthetic fat or keeping our eerily cheerful clinic attendants caffeinated.
LIKE, FOLLOW, SHARE (BEFORE WE DISAPPEAR)
Think Butter is twisted, terrifyingly funny, and disturbingly relatable? Help us spread it like… Butter!
- Post about us, tag us, and feed the algorithm (lest our director vanish again).
- Be that friend who yells about us at brunch, at pilates or to your mom!
- Drop the link in your group chat and tag your favorite gym bro.
Every follow, re-share, tweet, email, or DM brings us closer to our goal and to making this surreal satire a reality. Follow us on Instagram: @butter.is.fat
Wishlist
Use the WishList to Pledge cash and Loan items - or - Make a pledge by selecting an Incentive directly.
Pay the Crew
Costs $7,500
Student filmmaking means often asking people to work for free -- we'd like to not do that! Help us pay decent rates to everyone on the crew.
Pay the Cast
Costs $3,000
Butter and friends will be giving us a their time and talent and we'd like to pay them for both those things!
Production Design
Costs $4,500
The world of Butter will require lots of bold design, props, weird balls of fat, special effects make-up and more!
Misc Production Costs
Costs $2,500
Pre-production needs like travel, health insurances, security deposits, plus some funds to hold as a contingency during production.
Cash Pledge
Costs $0
Direct link:
Share this update!
About This Team
As two women who grew up in larger bodies in the early-2000s era of lowrise jeans, Kate Moss, and peak body-shaming culture, a satirical critique of the Ozempic machine and how society views fatness is the perfect joint thesis. We share a desire of taking on these “weighty” topics and transforming them through our collaborative and unique filmmaking perspectives to make an ambitious, fun, gross yet thrilling project. One that not only speaks to us personally but challenges us to grow in a world that keeps telling us to shrink.
Priyanka Krishnan (Writer/Director) is a lesbian, fat positive South Asian writer-director and tech entrepreneur from India, now based in New York City. With a background in Business and Computer Science from USC, she spent a decade leading innovation at companies like Hulu, DreamWorks Animation, and Francis Ford Coppola Wineries—pioneering DEI initiatives in storytelling and advocating for LGBTQ+ and WOC leadership in media.
Now an MFA Directing candidate at Columbia University, Priyanka’s films explore body and gender politics through dark humor and surrealism. Through her work, Priyanka challenges beauty standards in heteronormative spaces and aims to reclaim space for people of color and of all bodies on screen.
Caitlin Stevens (Producer) is a New York-based writer and producer originally from Texas. With a background in experiential marketing, event production and arthouse theater programming, she is drawn to projects that engage and immerse audiences, build community through fandom, and celebrate unique and diverse voices.
Now in the MFA Creative Producing program at Columbia, she aims to marry her previous career experience with creative development – allowing her to access the “making” side of things rather than the marketing and exhibition side – and strives to tell cross-genre stories grounded in real human experience with characters that work to heal and grow through humor and connection.
NEW MEMBERS OF TEAM BUTTER
Cailin Yatsko (Director of Photography), originally from Arkansas, is a New York City-based narrative, documentary, and commercial cinematographer. Narrative features include THE SURRENDER (SXSW Film Festival 2025, dir. Julia Max), THE SHORT HISTORY OF THE LONG ROAD (2019 Tribeca Film Festival, dir. Ani Simon-Kennedy), and DAYS OF GRAY (2013 Gotëborg Film Festival, dir. Ani Simon-Kennedy). Her longform documentary work includes NETIZENS (2018 Tribeca Film FesEval, dir. Cynthia Lowen) and 2nd Unit cinematography for the hybrid-doc series GROWING UP (2022 Disney+). Her commercial cinematography includes branded and editorial content for Dior, The New Yorker, Condé Nast, Smirnoff, Colgate, Vice, and many others. Cailin is a member of CinematographersXX and the International Community of Female+ Cinematographers. She is represented by Alexander Creatives.
Current Team
Incentives
- The Story
- Wishlist
- Updates
- The Team
- Community
Mission Statement
The Story
We did it! Thanks to your incredible support, Butter has officially reached 100% of our Seed&Spark goal. This film exists because of you, and we couldn’t be more grateful.
But we can't stop just yet! We’re now setting our sights on a stretch goal of $20,000. Here’s what that unlocks for us:
- Paying people closer to industry standards – In today’s tough economy, fairer pay helps us better support our talented cast & crew.
- Securing stronger locations – Expanding Butter’s world with more dynamic, cinematic spaces that elevate the story.
Every extra dollar goes directly into making the film sharper, funnier, scarier, and even more Butter-y. But first...
Butter is a woman in her late-30s struggling to fit in the world, physically. She feels invisible, she feels shamed, she feels FAT. The worst thing a woman can be!
Fortunately, Dr. O at the Wait & Watchers clinic, has a new solution for her -- OZERO, a revolutionary new drug to help her shed that weight, literally. It doesn’t just remove your fat…. it liberates it!
Butter thus embarks on a journey to finally be hot! Drawn to the world of instant gratification and internet validation, Butter finally rakes in the chips of her skinny privileges. She gets everything she’s ever wanted: Her twin mothers’ approval, acceptance into every social group, Dr. O's clean bill of health and even respect at the gym.
Yet the “smaller” she becomes the larger the consequences start to show. As her body changes drastically, Butter has to make a choice. How small is small enough? How thin is too thin? Does one really need all those heavy limbs? Let’s ask Butter.
But wait, where’d she go? Hello??
Women’s bodies are always up for debate. Endlessly dissected or celebrated, condemned or commodified, they occupy so much of our cultural imagination that they become the ultimate battleground for control and power.
Moving through the world as a queer, fat, brown woman means I’m constantly negotiating a paradox. I push myself to take up space. Be loud. Be proud. Be big. Yet, i’m simultaneously learning and stealthily absorbing the practice of shrinking myself in order to … just belong.
My “body” of work questions: how much is too much space? Physically, emotionally, psychologically, I explore these questions through fatness. Why fatness? Because the mere existence of FAT sparks outrage. It demands to take up space as the world relentlessly conspires to erase it.
We thus explore this world through Butter’s eyes, as she guides the audience to question their own internalized ideas of beauty, shame, and visibility. Her story reminds us that if you don’t conform, the powers that be will melt you down and consume you in one satisfying gulp!
The film’s surreal and satirical tone, paired with campy visual worldbuilding, gives me the freedom to be playful as a director. Being playful with the form and content especially at a time where the “heavy” discourse is centered around dehumanization of bodies.
Playful with ideas that can grow fat without being judged.
“After all butter isn’t always bitter and Betty did buy some better butter to make the bitter batter better with more butter” - Priyanka Krishnan
Butter is set in a heightened, unsettlingly yet familiar version of New York City, where absurdity is seamlessly woven into the everyday. Love handles roll away as perfect, gleaming orbs of fat. Doctors cheerfully prescribe disappearance as the ultimate form of self-care. Friends and family call it “an incredible transformation.” Butter’s vanishing body is both a medical marvel and a social currency. The smaller she becomes, the bigger the world opens up for her, more invitations, more attention, more power.
The tone is off-kilter laced with emotional truth. The film is designed to take the audience from curiosity to discomfort. It is satire wearing a hyper-glam mask, riffing on consumerism, body politics, and the cult of self-improvement.
Its stylistic DNA draws from But I’m a Cheerleader’s artificial candy-colored worlds, Death Becomes Her’s campy body grotesque, and Brazil’s bureaucratic absurdity.
Visually, the world is a tug-of-war between external spectacle and internal reckoning:
- External: The sterile, clinical precision of the Wait & Watchers clinic, the glossy white plastics, symmetrical seating, eerily cheerful attendants contrasts with the chaotic opulence outside: paparazzi flashbulbs, Instagram livestreams, champagne towers, and money-and-sex-drenched indulgence.
- Internal: Butter’s void is an infinite black expanse punctured by harsh spotlights, flickering projections of the self, and surreal dreamscape where butter must confront her inner shadows.
In the world of Butter visibility comes at the ultimate cost where every space is a reflection of the shrinking self and in the end there’s nothing left to applaud but your absence.
We are raising funds to get this film in motion! Traditional film financing doesn't work well for shorts as there aren't a lot of distribution options so we're asking for sheer generosity and good will. Our overall budget is over the $17.5K that we're fundraising through Seed & Spark, but we've already secured a $12.5K grant to get us started!
That initial grant will let us pay for locations, equipment rentals and feeding our cast and crew (important!), but there's still many more things you can contribute to. If this campaign exceeds its goal (if we could be so lucky), funds will be routed to the post-production phase (VFX, color grading, sound design) or go towards festival submission fees so we can get this out into the world. Not a cent will be wasted!
All dollars will go to:
- Feeding our cast and crew (21% - secured through grant)
- Finding unique locations (19% - secured through grant)
- Equipment (7% - secured through grant)
- Production design, props, practical special effects (13%)
- Paying cast (9%)
- Paying crew (25%)
- Misc pre-production costs (deposits, fees, etc) (7%)
We've already moved into our pre-production phase with the funds we've already secured and are shooting this fall:
- August - October 2025 - Pre-Production (casting, locations, additional fundraising)
- November 2025 - Production (5 days of film production in NYC)
- December 2025 - Initial Edit
- January - April 2026 - Post-Production (VFX, Color Grading, Sound Design, etc)
- May 2026 - Festival Submissions + Premiere
MAKE A PLEDGE
Whether you’re a filmmaker, a film lover, or just someone who enjoys watching people literally lose their heads, we’ve got some deliciously absurd incentives waiting for you. Step into Butter’s strange, glossy world and help us make this disappearing act happen.
SPONSOR A DEPARTMENT
Peep our Wishlist and claim bragging rights for fueling the magic—whether it’s funding our prosthetic fat or keeping our eerily cheerful clinic attendants caffeinated.
LIKE, FOLLOW, SHARE (BEFORE WE DISAPPEAR)
Think Butter is twisted, terrifyingly funny, and disturbingly relatable? Help us spread it like… Butter!
- Post about us, tag us, and feed the algorithm (lest our director vanish again).
- Be that friend who yells about us at brunch, at pilates or to your mom!
- Drop the link in your group chat and tag your favorite gym bro.
Every follow, re-share, tweet, email, or DM brings us closer to our goal and to making this surreal satire a reality. Follow us on Instagram: @butter.is.fat
Wishlist
Use the WishList to Pledge cash and Loan items - or - Make a pledge by selecting an Incentive directly.
Pay the Crew
Costs $7,500
Student filmmaking means often asking people to work for free -- we'd like to not do that! Help us pay decent rates to everyone on the crew.
Pay the Cast
Costs $3,000
Butter and friends will be giving us a their time and talent and we'd like to pay them for both those things!
Production Design
Costs $4,500
The world of Butter will require lots of bold design, props, weird balls of fat, special effects make-up and more!
Misc Production Costs
Costs $2,500
Pre-production needs like travel, health insurances, security deposits, plus some funds to hold as a contingency during production.
Cash Pledge
Costs $0
Direct link:
Share this update!
About This Team
As two women who grew up in larger bodies in the early-2000s era of lowrise jeans, Kate Moss, and peak body-shaming culture, a satirical critique of the Ozempic machine and how society views fatness is the perfect joint thesis. We share a desire of taking on these “weighty” topics and transforming them through our collaborative and unique filmmaking perspectives to make an ambitious, fun, gross yet thrilling project. One that not only speaks to us personally but challenges us to grow in a world that keeps telling us to shrink.
Priyanka Krishnan (Writer/Director) is a lesbian, fat positive South Asian writer-director and tech entrepreneur from India, now based in New York City. With a background in Business and Computer Science from USC, she spent a decade leading innovation at companies like Hulu, DreamWorks Animation, and Francis Ford Coppola Wineries—pioneering DEI initiatives in storytelling and advocating for LGBTQ+ and WOC leadership in media.
Now an MFA Directing candidate at Columbia University, Priyanka’s films explore body and gender politics through dark humor and surrealism. Through her work, Priyanka challenges beauty standards in heteronormative spaces and aims to reclaim space for people of color and of all bodies on screen.
Caitlin Stevens (Producer) is a New York-based writer and producer originally from Texas. With a background in experiential marketing, event production and arthouse theater programming, she is drawn to projects that engage and immerse audiences, build community through fandom, and celebrate unique and diverse voices.
Now in the MFA Creative Producing program at Columbia, she aims to marry her previous career experience with creative development – allowing her to access the “making” side of things rather than the marketing and exhibition side – and strives to tell cross-genre stories grounded in real human experience with characters that work to heal and grow through humor and connection.
NEW MEMBERS OF TEAM BUTTER
Cailin Yatsko (Director of Photography), originally from Arkansas, is a New York City-based narrative, documentary, and commercial cinematographer. Narrative features include THE SURRENDER (SXSW Film Festival 2025, dir. Julia Max), THE SHORT HISTORY OF THE LONG ROAD (2019 Tribeca Film Festival, dir. Ani Simon-Kennedy), and DAYS OF GRAY (2013 Gotëborg Film Festival, dir. Ani Simon-Kennedy). Her longform documentary work includes NETIZENS (2018 Tribeca Film FesEval, dir. Cynthia Lowen) and 2nd Unit cinematography for the hybrid-doc series GROWING UP (2022 Disney+). Her commercial cinematography includes branded and editorial content for Dior, The New Yorker, Condé Nast, Smirnoff, Colgate, Vice, and many others. Cailin is a member of CinematographersXX and the International Community of Female+ Cinematographers. She is represented by Alexander Creatives.