It’s that time of year again: Playback‘s Indie List is now open for submissions.

The list is an annual measurement of production volume for independently-owned Canadian prodcos. It provides valuable insight into how Canada’s indie production companies have fared with rising costs and inflationary pressures, as well as other macro factors, such as the dual U.S. strikes.

Companies that take part will be recognized among the top domestic indies, based on production and development spend during the 2023 calendar year. The Indie List report will be published online and in our Spring 2024 issue.

How the survey works

The survey measures all production and development by volume on a calendar year basis, including service production.

Volume is expressed in terms of total screen-entertainment production budget(s) handled by a company. It does not include advertising, corporate or commercial production. Proprietary independent production and service production are tallied separately. Spend is self-reported and works on the honour system, so we ask that companies be as accurate as possible. Productions of all languages are eligible for inclusion.

What we will publish

Total production spend, total development spend, total service production spend, total feature production spend, and total production spending broken down by genre. A separate chart will be created for companies whose overall spend is exclusively under service production. Playback also captures qualitative data about the state of the industry, which will be used in our reporting in addition to the Indie List. The results will be available online and in print.

What we won’t publish

Per-project production spending, per-project development spending – while we ask you to include the spend for individual projects, we will not publish any of this information.

Click here to access the survey.

The deadline to submit is March 22.