'Back to basics' … the Videre pinhole camera. Photograph: Kelly Angood

You can do a lot with a cardboard box. Make a fort. Make a Halloween costume. Or how about turning it into a camera? Designer Kelly Angood did just that, and ended up creating a pinhole camera that has taken off thanks to a crowdfunding campaign that went viral.

In April, Angood launched a Kickstarter campaign for her lensless DIY camera, the Videre – meaning "to see" in Latin. It works like any pinhole camera: light flows into a tiny opening in its body, forming an image on photographic film at the back of the box. The Videre generated a lot of buzz, and within weeks she had not only hit her £15,000 target to fund the manufacture of 2,000 screen-printed Videre prototypes, but had soared past her goal by a good £20,000.

As part of the Instagram generation, Angood, who is 25, wanted the camera to help her slow down and get back to basics. "I use the internet way too much, I know I do. I caught myself the other day checking Twitter on my phone and then checking it on my computer at the same time," she says, laughing before sipping herbal tea in a London cafe. Working on the Videre became a therapeutic way for Angood to disconnect from the online world and spend "a lot of time with loads of cardboard, having Radio 4 on" as she cut out and folded material for the design.

Angood went through the production process once before, creating a cardboard Hasselblad imitation in 2011 (though for legal reasons she couldn't whip up a batch to sell for profit). She decided to keep the Videre relatively local, working exclusively with UK-based screen-printers and die-cutters. Illustrator Joseph Vass printed the first few cameras, but Angood realised she needed to scale up production – so she headed north, to Leeds, where she had access to more space and lower costs.

In late November, Angood debuted the £35 camera at Beach London gallery space. A series of portraits she shot with the camera hung on one wall, while punters drank London Pride and delicately handled the three Videres on display at the back of the room. The lightweight cameras are flatpacked in what looks like a pizza box, and you punch out each piece from perforated cardboard to build the camera in several steps.

Maurice Barnich, an audio engineer in Luxembourg, snapped up a pair of Videres as soon as they were available. He's a collector of pinhole cameras, mostly wooden Zero Images, but the Videre is his only cardboard model. Unlike a digital camera, it helps him concentrate on the process of film photography, because, he says, "everything has to freeze for four to five seconds: that's really the shortest exposure you can get. It's not about point and shoot – it's really low-tech, going back to the laws of physics and optics. You don't have a lens, but you can do an awful lot."

Slow photography … the cardboard camera is sold as a flatpack kit. Photograph: Kelly Angood

This willingness to experiment with techniques and play around with exposure times has helped an online community around the Videre. Angood has a presence on social media, and regularly posts users images, as well as behind-the-scenes footage and instructional videos. And next in the pipeline? She wants to design a smaller, simpler version of the camera for primary schoolchildren.

"These days kids are so digitally native that a lot of them haven't even experienced film photography and it really is magic for them," Angood says. So, while declines in film sales around the world have knocked – or destroyed – giants like Kodak, Agfa and Konica, a space might just be opening up for well-designed analogue cameras. Companies like the Impossible Project, responsible for buying out and reviving the last functional Polaroid film factory, and Lomography, the team behind a huge range of prettied-up experimental cameras, have already paved the way. And if you can get the kids into it too, film may just get a second chance.