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Applications Open for Dogfish Accelerator
Last year, I did a lengthly profile on Dogfish Pictures’ inaugural Accelerator program, which adapts a start up financing model to the independent film landscape. Dogfish equips each of its selected participants with seed financing and an office space where they’ll develop their product(s) over the course of nine-weeks, with added input from mentors. The program is capped off by a demo day, in which a member from each team pitches to a room full of investors, industry personnel and lowly journalists like myself. Applications are now open for the second edition of Accelerator through August 8, but this year, James Belfer and Co. are widening the field. “Content is content, no matter what form it takes,” said the CEO in a statement.
As such, Accelerator is extending the applicant pool to makers of “shorts, multimedia, television series, webisodes, animation, graphic novels, comic books, video games, music videos, visual art, design and social media applications like Vine, Instagram, and Tumblr.” The irony of course is that nowadays, the majority of the aforementioned are more profitable than an independent feature, which ensures a greater ROI for the participants, investors, and Dogfish themselves. Last year, the most enticing projects were ones that bridged technology and user curation with straight-forward film elements, and the deeper pool will no doubt draw more of those to the surface.
