The Independent Production Fund and its 40-member Pre-Selection Committee have selected 30 projects which are now eligible to advance to Phase 2 of the application process and apply for Production financing. These include 20 projects in English and 10 in French. Four web series previously funded by the IPF are eligible to apply for funding for second or subsequent seasons.
The IPF received 170 proposals for web series funding from across Canada, in English and in French. Applications included 2-minute proof-of-concept trailers, creative material and audience engagement strategies. Development opportunities for new talent and mentorship by experienced creative and business web series professionals were evaluation factors. All of these criteria were reviewed, scored and discussed by the Pre-Selection Committee members, who are industry professionals and advanced media students.
Producers of the selected shortlisted projects are now invited to submit complete Production Applications by May 1, 2018. Â An international Jury will evaluate these proposals and the Board of Directors of the IPF will make final funding decisions in June.
“The 2018 “IPF Trailer Season†as dubbed by the industry, has exposed online viewers to great Canadian talents and teased them with terrific stories that have been watched, liked and shared by hundreds of thousands of fans during the past month.  “Our Canadian production community is certainly not lacking in imagination and diversity†noted Andra Sheffer, CEO of the IPF. “ The efforts that have gone into creating the content and engaging audiences will ideally provide invaluable feedback to all those who have participated in this process.†Continue reading for a list of the projects receiving funding.
You might, as I did after watching two episodes of Learning Nature with Chris Locke, think it’s a one-note web series. The tale of a pudgy man named Chris who casts the cruel, unfeeling big city away for the embrace of nature … but has no real clue how wild the wild truly is.
But to watch all eight webisodes of Learning Nature with Chris Locke, available on Funny or Die now, is to see a man enamoured with trees, rocks, the sky, birds, worms and water but having no real knowledge of them and left struggling to survive. Locke, a hilarious stand-up comic who has also appeared in episodes of Mr. D, Baroness Von Sketch Show and The Beaverton, teamed with longtime collaborator Derek Horn to create the eight-part opus.
“People watch the first episode and say, ‘I get it, web humour,'” Locke says over the phone. “But stick with it and you will see my butt.” While Horn (who has worked with Locke on such projects as Hello, What? and Kelly 5-9) directed, edited, lit and worried about the budgets for Learning Nature, Locke established the character, a friendly shlub who aims to educate viewers on facts regarding a plethora of things you see in nature.
The first instalment of the iThentic production, “Trees,” features Chris welcoming us into a lush forest for his first-ever documentary. Chris is super-enthusiastic as he hugs a nearby tree he dubs one of “the mighty tall giants of the woods.” He expounds on their multiple uses, including making paper out of them, building log cabins … or creating a wooden sword to practice fighting with. The hilarity and oddness of Learning Nature are in camera angles lingering a little too long, unsure footing and Chris’ meandering patter. He knows a little too little about nature as it turns out, leading to uncomfortable facts about his personal life being revealed. It’s a character Locke has been perfecting for years.
“I’ve been making shorts since 2005 or 2006,” Locke says. “And I’ve always been honing that kind of guy. A dumb, worried, idealistic weirdo. It was always in the back of our minds that if you like our brand this is what it is if we had freedom.” The duo, along with friend/production assistant/spiritual advisor Aaron Eves, spent three full days at Headwaters Farm in Cobourg, Ont., as Locke rumbled around in the brush, his character spouting questionable nature know-how and some core beliefs. It all comes to a head in “Worms,” when an event sends Chris into an emotional spiral. A lot of work went into those three days, production-wise, figuring out logistics and camera angles.
“Visually you look at it and you think, ‘Oh, he’s just being a goof,’ but the technical aspect behind that is huge,” Locke reveals. “And I can’t stress this enough that Derek did it all by himself.” Filming had its challenges and wasn’t restricted to just weather, fauna and foliage. Capturing a key scene at a lake was delayed until the last possible moment thanks to a group of young guys who wandered into Locke’s vicinity.
“I was like, ‘Oh my god, are you serious?’ We had waited all day to get this shot,” he says. “They ducked behind a bunch of bushes, probably to smoke something, and as soon as they did I said, ‘Let’s go,’ stripped off all my clothes and jumped into the lake in one take.”
Learning Nature with Chris Locke is available on Funny or Die now.
Link: Interview: The Amazing Gayl Pile’s Morgan Waters
“It’s sort of like an absurdist, dark, melodrama comedy series, that goes in a million different directions. I guess they’d have to see it to get the tone, but people that I’m inspired by, like Steve Coogan who plays Alan Partridge, he would be a dream collaborator.” Continue reading.Â
Four schoolkids get in trouble on purpose so they can explore the tunnels under their school in search of a secret laboratory that holds mysterious treasure. That’s the premise behind Detention Adventure, one of dozens of projects seeking Independent Production Fund assistance to bring Season 1 to life.
Co-created by Joe Kicak and Carmen Albano, written by Kicak, Albano and Karen Moore, executive-produced by Moore, Lauren Corber and produced by Ryan West, Detention Adventure summons Goonies, Stand By Me and the Harry Potter franchise in its tone. Legend says inventor Alexander Graham Bell built a secret lab under a school attended by three nerds. Raign (Simone Miller), Joy (Alina Prijono) and Hulk (Jack Fulton) are determined to find the entrance, which is supposed to be located somewhere in the old library that now serves as a detention room. The trio’s plan? Get into trouble, go to detention and find that entrance. The problem? Raign, Joy and Hulk have to include the school bully, Brett (Tomaso Sanelli), in their plans.
“We really tried to get at something that was more cinematic and dynamic than a studio school show,” Moore says. “The series is full of adventures in these tunnels and the scientific experiments that are part of it. This shows how exciting science can be and the adventures the kids can take.” Each 11-minute instalment of the potential 10-episode first season finds the sixth-grade students calling upon their scientific and problem-solving skills to tackle and break through a series of puzzles, traps and riddles to find the elusive lab.
Detention Adventure is a departure for Moore. Most recently a writer on decidedly adult projects like Workin’ Moms, Rookie Blue and What Would Sal Do?, she’s written and produced two BravoFACT short films in Must Kill Karl (alongside Kicak) and Your Place Or Mine, and Frozen Marbles. Moore was looking for a progression from writing shorts and felt this was a natural move. Her time in the writing room under showrunners in Catherine Reitman and Tassie Cameron has given Moore the experience to write the serialized episodes Detention Adventure boasts; she, Kicak and Albano made up the writer’s room.
“It was me telling Joe and Carmen what to do,” Moore says with a laugh. Every episode of Detention Adventure contains themes of overcoming differences, empathy, cliffhangers and a lot of fun. The potential series is aimed at 6-12-year-olds, the pre-teen audience where stories of friendship and insecurity are relatable.
“This is the time when kids are still up for more wholesome fun,” Moore says. “But they also have the tools and the independence to have some life skills to draw on and be at the level of these science experiments and problem-solving.”
Support Detention Adventure by clicking through to the show’s YouTube page and liking it! And check out more projects seeking IPF funding.
It’s a year after our inaugural spotlight on web series seeking Independent Production Fund support, and the state of those series in Canada is booming. Projects like But I’m Chris Jericho, The Amazing Gayl Pile, Whatever, Linda, Space Riders: DivisionEarth and Inhuman Condition are just a few of the many that received IPF support in the past and have gone on to full-blown web and television series.
Established in 1991 to provide financial support for dramatic television series, the IPF was expanded in 2010 to include financing drama series for the web. That mandate has been extended indefinitely. The result? Dozens of trailers for potential projects have been posted on YouTube. Check them out here.
With a deadline of March 31 approaching, creators are looking for support via views and comments about their potential projects before the IPF makes their decision; in 2017 the IPF approved funding for 15 scripted series (10 in English and five in French); three were renewals for past projects with the other 12 being new ones. (One was My 90-Year-Old Roommate, starring Lauren Corber, Ethan Cole and Josh Schultz.)
Here are a few projects that caught our eye, as well as the links to some honourable mentions. Watch, click, comment and help them all gain funding!
The Series:Silver
The Creator(s): Simu Liu
The Idea: In the year 2025, a vampire named Reeve (Liu) works for a group called the Silver Corps—a paramilitary group charged with keeping vampires in check. Reeve ignores an order to kill a vampire child. Now his own organization is hunting them.
The Inspiration: Simu Liu has been looking to do something in the genre space for a long time. Inspired by the sci-fi and action projects he watched as a kid and a love of stunts, he combined them all into Silver. “When you attack something that is already out there and has been done, you want a fresh take on it,” he says. “Instead of having the vampires be these creatures that are respected and revered, they are the social outcasts and a stand-in for a lot of minority groups today and throughout history.”
The Plan: A 10-episode web series of 10 minutes each that Liu likens as a comic book on film: “A visually-driven story where every frame is beautiful.”
The Series:The Communist’s Daughter
The Creator(s): Leah Cameron
The Idea: Amid 1980s Canada, Dunyasha McDougald, the daughter of two Communists struggles with fitting in at high school and supporting her family’s beliefs.
The Inspiration: The Communist’s Daughter is loosely based on Cameron’s childhood: her father was a Communist during the 1980s. As a result—Cameron explains—the family car was a Lada, Soviet Life magazine was delivered to the door, and family vacations were to Cuba to “support the economy.” It was only looking back on her childhood that Cameron realized how odd—and funny—her life was. The trailer stars Jessica Holmes (Air Farce), Aaron Poole (Strange Empire), Bruce Novakowski (Inconceivable) and Hilary McCormack.
The Plan: Cameron’s creation will live on the web as 10- to 12-minute episodes; she’s got major plans for the family that takes advantage of a more serialized setup. “The father is going to run for election in a highly-embarrassing and highly public campaign,” Cameron says. “Which will make his daughter’s attempt to fit in at high school even harder and that needs a story arc.” Additionally, Cameron is excited to show Gen Xers and millennials who are interested in what Toronto looked like in the 1980s to actually see the city—and the diversity of its population—represented during that time.
The Series:Don’t Ask Alice (The Adventures of Collie and Doli)
The Creator(s): Connie Wang and Lakna Edilima
The Idea: Two millennials, Collie (Wang) and Doli (Edilima), offer new-age advice to fellow twentysomethings.
The Inspiration:Â Connie Wang and Lakna Edilima, friends since Grade 9 math class, weren’t getting the gigs (Wang in acting, Edilima in a writer’s room) in the Canadian TV industry they’d hoped for. After a night out cracking each other up, they decided to just create their own series. “Collie and Doli think they know everything,” Wang says. “At the time, Lakna and I thought we knew everything when we wrote it.”
The Plan: Season 1 of 12 webisodes of about five minutes each. Each one features a caller needing advice from Collie and Doli. The pair offer something outrageous to their caller … and then try out their own advice. “We find out that, ‘Oh, this doesn’t actually work.’ The moral of the story is, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have called him that,’ or ‘Maybe I shouldn’t just assume that guys like that.'”
The Series:Beattie & Mae
The Creator(s): Melanie Leishman and Emily Coutts
The Idea:Â Two sisters, Beattie (Leishman) and Mae (Coutts), find themselves recruited by a competitive direct-sales cosmetics company in the fashion-and-feminism influenced world of 1997.
The Inspiration: The friends were commiserating over their shared past of being initiated by places and friends in multi-level marketing companies. The sales technique was ripe for humour, Leishman says, and the show grew from there while embracing feminism, relationships and the 1990s. “We get to the root of Beattie and Mae’s relationship and their relationship to the company,” Coutts says. The specific decade was chosen, Leishman explains, because it was before the Internet and recruitment changed to online. It also serves as a backdrop to two women coming of age.
“Feminism has come a long way in the last 20 years,” Leishman says. “The pop culture world of 1997 seemed like a hilarious place to set these two women as they try to figure out who they are in the big city for the first time.”
The Plan: An eight-episode web series of seven-minute instalments is the first step for Beattie & Mae, with a long-term goal of an adaptation for television. A main event occurs in each episode, Leishman says, with the focus on the sisters dealing with that incident differently.
Honourable mentions
The Motorcycle Project
Two half-sisters (played by Elise Bauman and Humberly González) go on a wild and crazy adventure across South America in search of the truth behind their sister’s mysterious death.
The Has Been
Amy Jo Johnson (Flashpoint), writes, directs and stars in this project about a bankrupt former A-list actress who attends ComicCon to raise the funds needed to pay off her debts.
What Got Did
Created by Grace Lynn Kung and Rob Shapiro, Paige Ho will stop at nothing to turn ParKer into the next great startup in Silicon Valley North. The only thing standing in her way? Pretty much everything.
Super Zee
An action comedy about a queer Black superhero (Sedina Fiati), who swoops in to save her woman crush (Christina Song), from microaggressions at the office.
Detention Adventure
A group of sixth graders get themselves put into detention so they can explore the tunnels under their school.
Swings A mockumentary about two co-dependant best friends Kevin (Kevin Vidal) and Christian (Christian Smith) serving as the “swings” (musical understudies) for a giant Broadway-level production of Nickelback The Musical.
The After Party Girls
The partially true, completely embarrassing stories of best friends Jules (Cheyenne Mabberley) and Fiona (Katey Hoffman), who are determined to become popular and the life of the party.
Held
Megan Follows directs and Alanna Bale and Kristopher Turner both star in this psychological suspense series written by Alison Bingeman and based on Edeet Ravel’s novel.
The Six
Six inner city teens chase success in rap stardom, basketball fame, fashion design, drug running, self-worth and independence on the streets of Toronto.
Hospital Show
Follows the damaged actors and actresses who play doctors on Critical Condition. Created by and starring Adam G. Reid alongside co-stars Sara Canning and Adrian Holmes.
Ming’s Dynasty
Two Toronto rappers are stuck running a Chinese restaurant in smalltown Alberta. Will they chase the beats or the eats?
Queens
A peek at the drag scene through the eyes of an eclectic group of drag queens as they prep to compete in the “Miss Church Street Pageant.”
Image Killer
A gallows humour series about a serial killer who hunts down arrogant social media personas in the vein of Scream Queens meets Fargo.
