If you want to be an innovative filmmaker these days, the best plan is to follow the crowd.

Pete Postlethwaite who plays The Archivist in Franny Armstrong's 'The Age of Stupid.'

That's exactly the revolutionary approach activist filmmaker Franny Armstrong has taken to independently fund her new part-fact, part-fiction climate change documentary, "The Age of Stupid."

"The Age of Stupid" has not been funded by banks or large media organisations like many movies, but by an innovative system which harnesses the cash of ordinary folks for a cut of the movie's profits. It is called crowd-funding and it is the first time this method has been used to fund a film in the UK.

"When we first showed our plans to our lawyer," Armstrong, who is best known for 1998 documentary "McLibel" in which a postman and a gardener take the McDonalds Corporation to court, told UK newspaper The Guardian, "he told us: 'It's the most original film funding scheme I've seen in 25 years working in the industry.'"

The premise is simple: Investors sink a minimum of £5,000 ($6,900) into production of the film and in return they get a "share" of the film's profits. Interested parties with shallower pockets can donate from £20 upwards towards the documentary.

And what do people get in return? First on the list of benefits on the film's website is the  "warm fuzzy feeling" of contributing to a worthwhile cause.

The fictional section of Armstrong's film stars Oscar-winner and Pete Postlethwaite as an archivist in a devastated future earth looking back to today asking why mankind didn't make changes when it had the chance.

It links together documentary footage of six people affected by and affecting climate change. Among them are 82-year-old French mountain guide Fernand Pareau in the Chamonix valley, where the glaciers are melting and lifelong Shell employee Alvin DuVernay, who rescued 100 people after Hurricane Katrina.

For the less romantically inclined, the returns break down like this: invest £5,000 and get 0.05 percent of profits, 0.10 percent of profits for an investment of £10,000 ($13,833) and 0.20 percent for £20,000 ($27,666) - but only if the film makes a profit. If not, the money is lost.

While some investors are wealthy, many of the investors are made up of groups of people from - there is a hockey team, a mother's group and a women's health center.

Armstrong will also keep the rights to the film for herself (the usual model is to sell the rights to a film to a distributor), which will allow anyone who logs on to the Web site and pays a small licence fee to hold a screening of the film allowing all kinds of small-scale screenings to take place in schools, church halls and other local venues.

Ultimately, Armstrong hopes that 250 million people will see her film in the run up to the UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December and that she can harness the power of the crowd to force governments to take action.

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