Making a go of it in the Canadian film biz ain’t easy, but Canadian film site First Weekend Club is one step closer to making their goal of doing so a reality.

Playback caught up with the website’s executive director, Anita Adams, at the Whistler Film Festival last week to chat about plans for a new VOD-modeled “Virtual Cinema” for Canadian film.

The website has for almost two months now been in the first phase of raising financing for the project, which aims to provide a select library of Canadian films available for streaming at a per-film cost.

The non-profit has invested approximately $100,000 in resources to bulk up the site’s infrastructure to support a VOD platform – much of which is in-kind contributions – and this fall launched a crowd-sourced funding campaign on Indie GoGo.

With a posted goal of $22,000, the campaign raised $22,718 directly through the site, and additional donations were made offline, Adams says. In total, the site has raised $45,000 toward its beta launch.

Building awareness about Canadian film has been the site’s mandate since it launched in 2003, but in 2010, the non-profit decided it needed a sustainable manner by which to generate revenue for its operations, Adams says.

“We realized that we need to become more self sustaining – how can we generate revenue for our non-profit organization so that we’re not dependent on government funds if the axe falls?  We want this to be a business, an organization that can continue to support Canadian film,” she explains.

Telefilm has come on board as a funding partner for the project and Adams says she is in discussions with several other companies about possible involvement.

The initial launch of the site will be very small, she says, and will focus on a small number of films available to the Indie GoGo investors as part of their reward for investing. Robin Smith, a FWC board member and founder of indie distributor KinoSmith, has agreed to license films for the site and FWC is in talks with other distributors about having their films featured on the site as well.

However, formal output deals are not the goal for the site, Adams says, and deals will be negotiated on a per-film basis.

“There are going to be films that we don’t get on our site,” she notes. “Or at least not right away. But then those filmmakers or distributors are going to see how we are kicking some butt and they’ll come to us and we’ll get some great stuff.”

Eventually, the site may move toward a subscription model and it is also considering innovative price models that would play into FWC’s strategy of using social media as the main marketing strategy behind the Virtual Cinema.

“One of the things we’re talking about is a pay-per-chapter model, where if you like what you’re seeing, you can pay a bit more to see more. So we think that will generate some really interesting metrics that we could share with distributors and funding agencies. There are some really cool things that you can do in the online world that you can’t do at the theatrical level,” she notes.

And despite all the work going into the Virtual Cinema, and the buzz around it, she emphasizes that building an audience for Canadian films’ first weekend of theatrical release will remain the core focus of the site.

“First Weekend Club is about that theatrical release. So we’re not going to stop that. The money that we generate through this will then be re-invested into the organization and support our core activies. We will still continue to push the theatrical releases.”