Meet the Insiders: Startup Alley Edition, Filmmaker Entrepreneurs
New for 2013, Meet the Insiders is an opportunity to participate in vital discussions on the innovations and developments in the world of film across varying topics. Moderators will start by introducing and getting to know the Insider for the first 10 minutes, but the next 20 are an open forum where the audience is able to ask questions, discuss trends, connect with the film community, and gain insight and understanding of the industry from the insiders at the forefront of their respective fields.
Filmmaker Entrepreneurs
Frustrated with the current options for funding, producing or releasing content? Learn the ups and downs of starting a business from these filmmakers turned entrepreneurs who decided to change business as usual. For the first half of this session, James Belfer of Dogfish Accelerator, will moderate as Emily Best describes her experience as a filmmaker founding startup Seed&Spark. In the second half, Malcolm Pullinger, producer of Winnebago Man, and Jake Lodwick, a founder of Vimeo and CollegeHumor, will discuss their new venture, Elevision, a highly-curated platform for visionary short films, along with their philosophy on uniting the film and tech industries.
Check out other Startup Alley programming here: http://sxsw.com/film/startup-alley
Presenters
Emily Best founded Seed&Spark to make a contribution to the truly independent community in which she would like to make moving pictures. In 2011, she had the great fortune of producing her first feature with a remarkable group of women. The spirit, the community and the challenges of that project, Like the Water, inspired Seed&Spark. Before producing Like the Water, Emily produced theater, worked as a vision and values strategy consultant for Best Partners, ran restaurants, studied jazz singing at the Taller de Musics, tour guided and cooked in Barcelona, and before that, was a student of Cultural Anthropology and American Studies at Haverford College.
Jake Lodwick is an entrepreneur best known for creating Vimeo. Before that, he was CTO and product lead for CollegeHumor.com, and has served as an early advisor and investor to many successful startups, including Tumblr, Bleacher Report, and MakerBot. As a boy, he obsessively shot stop-motion video with his parents’ Hi8 camcorder, and as an adult has created dozens of short films, mostly for his own amusement.
Dogfish Pictures was founded by James Belfer in 2009 to provide strategy and/or financing for independent feature films. Credits include Craig Zobel's Compliance (2012, Magnolia Pictures, Sundance 2012 NEXT), Amy Heckerling's Vamps (2012, Anchor Bay Films), Like Crazy (2011, Paramount Vantage, 2011 Sundance Grand Jury Prize Winner), Salvation Boulevard (2011, IFC, Sundance 2011 Premiere), and The Romantics (2010, Paramount Famous, Sundance 2010 Premiere). Dogfish Pictures has also recently launched Dogfish Accelerator - the first seed accelerator program for indie film producers.
Malcolm Pullinger is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, who produced and edited the award-winning documentaries Winnebago Man (SXSW 2009), Following Sean, The Love Competition (SXSW 2012), and The Key of G. His films have been released theatrically in the US and Canada, have aired on the BBC, PBS, ARTE, and Channel Four, and have played at film festivals around the globe. Before co-founding Elevision, he served as the Producer & Creative Director of Wholphin, the acclaimed short film quarterly published by McSweeney’s.