Long time coming

It only accounted for about six column inches in Playback’s Jan. 3 issue, but the little item on developments at Toronto’s Skogland Films was really only the tip of a production trend iceberg.

The item described how Kari Skogland has agreed to be a commercial director for The Partners’ Film Company. But there’s more. Keeping her own company alive, Skogland will refocus it for the development and production of long-format material with the understanding that Partners’ will help execute these tv and feature projects.

More than just an expression of Skogland’s own desire to work more often on film and television projects (she has a track record, so to speak, with longer films and tv directing), the move foreshadows the plot line for all the players in Canada’s commercial business.

Skogland may have been the first to announce a formal production arrangement, but at least three other Toronto houses are thinking/planning similar moves. Commercial revenue levels took a roller coaster ride through much of 1993 and, while shops in many centers report a busy streak just now, the money printed in the good old days of the flush mid-’80s is long gone. Gone too, the attitude that conventional advertising alone will a successful business make.

Advertising is a receding hairline revenue source: an inherited condition which cannot be returned to its former splendor. Straight-ahead ads, which used to keep broadcasters cozy in the days before market fragmentation, now represent just part of the equation. As the tv stations and other media outlets scramble to make up the shortfalls left by declining ad revenues, so the commercial producers ought to find new growth potential.

All well and good that organizations such as the Commercial Production Association of Toronto are energetically and imaginatively devising strategies to entice more commercial business to Canada. Now these same marketing skills, as well as executive production and line production services, should be deployed on other types of projects, too.

Commercial directors, even post houses and special effects specialists, set up expressly to handle commercials, are pushing for long-form business. As the evolving technology erodes the ‘chore’ quotient from post-production, television and feature work become much more practical.

There doesn’t seem much future in hoping that commercial production, in and of itself, can continue to support large production infrastructures. Many houses, in an effort to maintain their ground, are playing the fly-in foreign director game at an increasingly frenetic pace. It may help maintain a critical mass of business volume; it does little to halt the revenue hair loss.

No doubt, the learning curve in other formats may appear daunting at the moment, but the alternative – standing pat – leaves the big spot houses on the Dodo path.