Hello everyone. My name is Virginia Thompson. I'm an independent producer. I'm well known for my television career and my first feature film, which I produced, distributed, and marketed. It was Corner Gas: The Movie. It went really well.

I want to get to the questions you asked me to answer today. First of all, concerning the effectiveness of government funding, it worked really well for Corner Gas: The Movie. The project was financed by Telefilm, the Canada Media Fund, Bell Media, federal and provincial tax credits, Tourism Saskatchewan, the Bell Fund, and Kickstarter crowdfunding.

The results were over-the-top. We sold out 100 theatres across the country. The film reached seven million Canadians through television. It made 220 million impressions online. It trended on Twitter nationally, both on the opening night in theatres and again during its broadcast premiere on television. It even trended worldwide. Over 55,000 DVD Blu-ray units have been sold to date, and they're still selling.

The next question was about how the film industry has changed since 2005. In response, I would echo my colleagues that everything has changed. In 2009 when Corner Gas the TV series wrapped, 3.2 million Canadians watched our show finale. It was the highest audience ever for a scripted show in English Canada on television. In 2009, online viewing and Facebook were new, and Twitter didn't exist. In just over five years we've moved from a linear world to a digital world. Viewers versus distributors are now in control of what they watch and their behaviour is clear. They'll watch films in a cinema, on television, on computers, on tablets and on phones. They'll pay to see films, find a way to watch films for free and share films illegally online. The good news is that they want to engage with films and the people who make them.

Let's talk about the success story again. In April 2009, when we were a TV show, our highest audience—and it's a record in Canada—was 3.2 million Canadians. But in December 2014 when we released the film, we more than doubled our audience in this new digital space. So there's some good news to be had, and I think there are ways of being successful in the future. The takeaway for me, and what I learned, is that today's world is all about engagement. If filmmakers engage with Canadians at home, their films will have a global reach. The paradigm shift for feature films is that the first screen, cinema box office revenue, has too much weight in measuring success. Today, from my perspective, the cinema screen is promotional and the real revenue is in the screens that follow it.

But let's go back to the effectiveness of government funding. It's an interesting story. I'll try to be quick.

In 2013, Corner Gas: The Movie was impossible to finance in Canada. In 2014, after listening to the market, I suggested a new approach to finance, promote and release the film with Carolle Brabant at Telefilm. Telefilm had to break their rules and create a pilot program for our film to move forward. It was a risk for all parties but it worked.

So, what happened in 2013, the bad year? We prepared our pitch. We were in a new world. The producers had a big audience engagement plan. We were going to refresh cornergas.com and launch a Facebook page and Twitter feed. We were going to use Brent Butt's 80,000 Twitter followers to get the word out. We were going to launch a quick Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign and get the audience involved, and we had a lot of different online things you saw play out this year.

We had a brand, a great story, and a great marketing plan. But what went wrong for us, first of all, was a lack of development dollars. We were first-time feature filmmakers. I'm very established in television but I had never made a feature film, and in the current system there was no money for me. That system was dry for us when we applied because the system gives established producers envelopes of money—and I agree with that—but there's very little money for the first-timer, or even people like us. We didn't fit within the system that was in place.

There are very few distributors in English Canada. eOne has a lot of power and it really was the core distributor that could handle a brand like ours. We did meet with some others as well. There was a problem with the movie from their perspective. It wasn't a niche picture and it was difficult to market, even though we said we wanted to market the film with them and we were willing to raise funding to do that for them. This was out-of-the-box thinking from their perspective and they offered us a third of the cash that we actually required to make the film.

We had a huge gap, so we went to CTV and they also said no. Why? Because they were not prepared to wait 18 months for a film to come to their network. That's how the system works. I asked what would happen if we did an event-based release in cinema and it went directly to all screens afterwards? They said, “We'd really like that, but it's never happened before in Canada”.

Then we went to Cineplex and we said that the movie Veronica Mars had just come out. It was event-based and it did very well. So we asked if they would do the same thing with Corner Gas. They agreed.

But we still had a big problem. We didn't have an eligible Canadian distributor. We now had Cineplex, we had the screens, we had the broadcaster, but we kind of broke a cardinal rule. I asked Telefilm and they gave us the opportunity to self-distribute the film. The film was a great success, as we all know.

Here are my recommendations, very quickly, if I have some more time.

Telefilm and the CMF are crucial and need to be bolstered in the digital age. There needs to be adequate development dollars available for producers with established track records that aren't feature film producers. Content creators are making content for all screens now, we all need to kind of.... Anyway, I can get into that.

Producers who have been turned down or are unable to access adequate funding from Canadian distributors but can demonstrate bona fide market support and credible financing for their films should be able to access Telefilm funding. We did that and it worked. It would be a huge help for producers if Telefilm had a small department to follow the cradle to grave creative financing, marketing, and distribution.

The government should look at the federal tax credit grind on new forms of funding like Kickstarter. We get grounds, so it's hardly worth going there, but we did it for marketing purposes.

During production, Telefilm should allow producers to be compensated for the marketing that they do because they must market while filming or they lose the huge opportunity to tell their stories to the audience when they're releasing a film.

I believe that marketing funding for Canadian distributors should be shared—sorry guys—between the distributor and the producer in order to reach audiences. Audiences want to speak to the creators. I believe in distribution, but I think we need to work together.

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