Terry Balagia, executive creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising, Toronto, was one of the judges at this year’s First Cut Awards.

The best young directors come from Toronto. Don’t ask me how. They just do. Always have. Now that I am here I see one of the reasons why. People in the industry in Toronto care enough to nurture, encourage and reward young talent. Now by young I do not mean young in age, though many of them are, I mean starting out as a director.

I would love to be a director. Think about it. You make anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 a day. Only work a couple days a month… say 10 jobs a year… two or three days a job… that’s a boat load of money and 28 days of each month to spend it. Which explains why those guys are so arrogant and won’t give poor working slobs like you and me the time of day.

Great life, right? For the handful of guys at the top it may be. But before you can be at the top you have to start at the bottom.

Well, I have seen the bottom and I am here to tell you it is full of a lot of fresh, imaginative, extremely talented new directors. Thirty of whom sent examples of their best work for consideration in the Third Annual First Cut Awards sponsored by Saatchi & Saatchi and Playback.

I was privileged to be one of the judges. Of the 30 entrants, more than half presented work which would dominate the competition in a city of lesser talent. But this is Toronto. And here the competition within the production community is intense.

From editors and post facilities to music composers to special effects artists, the standards here require you do more with less than either New York or Los Angeles. I can proudly say that our production department here is one of the finest in the entire Saatchi network. I wish I could claim some credit. But that credit goes to our head of production and the individual producers themselves and the quality support they receive from a close-knit community of production professionals that make Toronto sparkle.

But enough. Let’s get back to the First Cut Awards entrants. It is the third year of the competition which debuts new directors to the Toronto production community as well as giving them the possibility of having their work screened at Saatchi’s New Directors Showcase reel in Cannes. The goal is to provide an international stage for Toronto’s next generation of directors every year.

I expected raw first-time reels. What I screened were sophisticated, infinitely inspired bodies of work. The degree of professionalism was extremely high. The production nuances were beautifully balanced and the work was very mature.

My instincts were verified when two of the judges – one in Los Angles, the other in New York – called after giving their results and asked for the names of contestants #2, #12 and #8, and a host of others, because they had jobs coming down and they wanted these directors to bid on them and all they had were the numbers because we didn’t put the names on the ballots to protect objectivity during the judging process.

Check out this year’s First Cut winners reel, you may just get a shot at hiring a young director who, in a couple of years, will be way too successful and arrogant to even consider talking to you.