[Watch the video interview on YouTube here]
Film Courage: Your first producing credit goes back to around the time of the recession in 2007. I’m wondering what the state of the industry was at this time?
Shaked Berenson, Producer/Filmmaker: My first producing credit is in 2007, but I’ve been in the industry slightly before that.
I was actually very lucky. There were a few things that happened around the same time, right?
I remember because I started Epic Pictures right around that time.
I believe it was July ’07.
Our first [film] market was AFM.
And then I remember in Berlinale of ’08 is where the real crash came.
It’s not related to the production itself.
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But in terms of sales I remember for example, I might be getting it wrong, but we were selling this beautiful movie called Jack Brooks Monster Slayer.
It was a third party pickup, so I didn’t produce it, but we were doing foreign sales on it.
I remember we sold $175,000 for I think it was DVD rights in Germany or something like that.
So that was AFM in ’07.
By Berlinale of ’08, that number would be like all of Europe.
It’s like the numbers really went down, basically 100%.
A part of it was the recession.
A big part was the death of the DVD market.
I think what a lot of people don’t realize because Oh, you know it was DVD but then you know there is VOD or other things.
The internet which was supposed to kind of democratize them like there is unlimited shelf space, it actually went down because when you went to Blockbuster you could spend an hour going through the shelves
If we sell a movie for Blockbuster, they could have two units times 8,000 stores, that’s 16,000 units…(Watch the video interview on YouTube here).
About:
Shaked Berenson has marketed, sold, and released over 1,000 films and television series. As a Board Member at the Independent Film & Television Alliance (IFTA™) and a public speaker, Shaked has been a vocal advocate for independent filmmakers and for shortening the content distribution supply chain.
Shaked started his career as a coder, paying for his UCLA education by designing database architecture and running several e-commerce sites. His rare background in both tech and the film business allowed him to bridge creativity and analytics and design a tool that truly leverages both.
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