Back in October, Filmmaker spoke with a few of the driving forces behind Dogfish Pictures’ Accelerator Program, which seeks to bring the start-up financing model to independent film production. I’m pleased to report that James Belfer and Company’s months of hard work culminated in a successful Demo Day at the Microsoft Technology Center in midtown Manhattan last Friday. For myself, and a few others in the audience who aren’t necessarily of the tech-ilk, it was our first brush with this sort of presentation marathon, where one or two representatives from each team take to the floor for with a Powerpoint pitch before […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Dec 10, 2013Not long after he founded Dogfish Pictures in 2009, producer James Belfer sensed an industry-wide disconnect between content creation and return on investment. Filmmakers, he gleaned, were concerned with short-term assets, agreeing to sell their film to distributors for a fixed sum that was a mere fraction of the eventual profit. In order to capture the full value of their content, filmmakers would need a new set of marketing tools and a fair bit of elbow grease. Belfer felt that any of these strategies would not be found in the traditional film industry at all, but rather, in the tangential […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Oct 25, 2013