Vancouver Film School’s marketing of its student-produced content is paying off for its young creators, and could continue to pay off as a fund for films by future alumni.

In a first for a film school, VFS has partnered with New York-based Joost, and is offering two channels of student-made shorts – Animation and Visual Effects and Drama and Documentary – on the Internet TV service.

Joost takes 70% of the ad revenue, while VFS plans to put its 30% into a fund for projects by its graduates. The fund has no official name yet.

‘We’re going to be waiting until spring 2008 to figure out how much money is in the fund and whether it’s actually got any legs to it,’ says VFS director of marketing Stephen Webster. VFS will provide Joost with about 10 pieces of student-produced work per month.

Since VFS first started ‘experimenting’ with YouTube in October 2006, awareness of the school has exploded faster than at any other time in its 20-year history, says Webster. The school now has 292 videos posted on YouTube, which have attracted 4.5 million views, more than 8,200 loyal subscribers and 180,000 channel views.

When one video, Piece of Mind by graduate Ori Ben-Shabat, collected half a million views, Webster and VFS quickly assembled a ‘making-of’ video to address its 1,200 comments and reactions. Now, 11 months after it was first posted, Piece of Mind has recorded more than 800,000 views, while the making-of has attracted another 30,000.

‘I had initially predicted that we would maybe hit the homepage of YouTube very early on in the process, but I didn’t actually know,’ says Webster. ‘Within a matter of about four weeks, we hit the YouTube homepage and we spiked. We quickly became one of the number one channels with respect to higher education on YouTube.’

VFS expanded its experiment to include the Yahoo and Google Video services, Metacafe.com, Blip.tv, Revver.com, Heavy.com, Zannel.com, and social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

‘We realized very early on that just because a specific piece is successful at one place doesn’t mean it’s going to be successful at another place,’ says Webster. ‘Metacafe was very successful for our 3D modeling work, whereas Yahoo! was more successful for our animation and narrative work…We’ve got a pretty good handle on which sites are working effectively for us, which ones we’re nurturing, which ones we’re developing relationships with.’

VFS students are being approached by potential employers, says Webster. Toronto’s Spy Films, for example, has contacted several students for potential recruitment.

‘Any piece that we put on the channel garners between 2,000 and 5,000 views within a month,’ he says. ‘If a student puts that content on their own channel, they may get 10% of that, if they’re lucky, over a year…People are also looking at this material and asking, ‘How do they do that?’ and then ‘Where do they learn to do that?’ and now ‘How can I do that?”

– From Media in Canada