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Bell Fund taps 15 projects for $3M in short-form digital series program

By Kelly Townsend
December 3, 2021
The program has provided $740,000 to English-language projects for audience development through a new pilot initiative in addition to $2.2 million in production funds for English and French projects.

The Bell Fund has committed nearly $3 million across 15 projects through its Short-Form Digital Series program.

The program, which launched in 2017, provides up to $150,000 (or 75% of eligible costs) toward production of an original series.

New to the program this year is the addition of up to $50,000 toward audience development, provided to English-language projects. The Bell Fund partnered with the Shaw Rocket Fund and the Telus fund on a pilot program earlier this year, working with Vancouver-based agency Magnify Digital on its audience analytics platform, ViewerCentric, to offer discoverability insights for Canadian content.

Nine English-language projects and six French-language projects were selected this round, picking up a total of $2.2 million in production costs and $740,000 for audience development.

Among the nine English projects is Fae Pictures’ Streams Flow from a River (6 x 15 minutes), created by Christopher Yip for Super Channel, and CBC Gem productions I Hate People, People Hate Me (Turbo Bobbi Creative; 6 x 10 minutes) and Lazy Legs (Longhope Media; 7 x 15 minutes).

APTN lumi’s horror comedy anthology series Tales From the Rez (Blackfoot Nation Films; 6 x 15 minutes) also picked up funding, along with Love Nature and Animalogic series Floralogic (Blue Ant Digital; 26 x 8 minutes) and OUTtv’s Ezra (Hell Yes Entertainment; 10 x 12 minutes) and Killjoy Comedy (Shana Myara; 6 x 20 minutes).

Rounding out the English projects are Edge Of Frame (Sandbox Inc.; 6 x 8 minutes) for Narcity Canada and The Lady President (CaribbeanTales Media Group; 6 x 15 minutes), created by Frances-Anne Solomon for CaribbeanTales-TV.

The six French-language projects picking up funding are Décoloniser l’histoire (Picbois Productions; 10 x 6 minutes) and Philo Pop (Zone3; 8 x 7 minutes) for Telequebec.tv; Detox (UGO Multimédia; 6 x 10 minutes) for Tv5unis.ca; Je voudrais qu’on m’efface (Babel Films; 8 x 20 minutes) for Ici.Tou.tv; Saint Jean-du-Lac (Pimiento Médias; 6 x 20 minutes) for Noovo; and Naturalisations (w/t; Couzin Films; 6 x 10 minutes) for Crave.

Image: Unsplash