Playback is proud to present the 2024 cohort for our annual 10 to Watch. This year’s group of Canadian screen industry talents were selected from more than 250 submissions. We are rolling out profiles on each individual this month.
Far be it from Shawn Gerrard’s collaborators and colleagues to call him emerging — but “burgeoning” would certainly fit the bill.
The Toronto-based filmmaker, 38, cut his teeth in the industry as post-production producer on shows such as TVOKids and PBS’ Odd Squad, Netflix’s The Age of Samurai and CNN’s Story of Late Night. But that steady job turned out to be a stepping stone to a fulfilling career of telling his own stories.
“With writing, I like to focus on the stories that are closest and most personal to me; things about my community, or things that I feel a little bit conflicted about,” Gerrard tells Playback Daily.
With seven short films, a feature, and several TV episodes under his belt as a director, Gerrard is certainly no newbie to film and television, but his star is rising.
“It’s been awesome to see Shawn move from post-production to the director’s chair. People who come from post [are] very cognizant of what you absolutely need to tell the story,” says Christin Simms, a writer and executive producer at Sinking Ship Entertainment.
Simms, a 2009 10 to Watch alum, first met Gerrard when he was working post-production on Sinking Ship’s Odd Squad and their puppet show, Playdate. Later, the pair worked closely together as Gerrard stepped up to direct episodes of the entertainment company’s series Lockdown, Jane and the upcoming Dino Dex.
“Shawn’s innate sense of visual storytelling is just getting stronger,” she says. “He’s great with actors and, in particular, has worked with our kid cast to develop authentic performances, despite the fact that they are talking to a tennis ball that will become a creature like a T-Rex or chimpanzee after six months of VFX work.”
Gerrard is first-and-foremost a storyteller, and that all began at York University’s film production and screenwriting program. During his studies, he worked at the Apple retail store, saving up enough cash to fund his short film projects.
“Much to my surprise, when I graduated [in 2011], there wasn’t this huge market for these fresh-out-of-film-school directors,” says Gerrard, “and so I needed to work and get a job and make a living.”
Concurrently, he was creating his own films, starting with Isaiah’s Birthday, a short about a nine-year-old boy meeting his biological father for the first time.
“The films didn’t necessarily [screen at] the biggest film festivals — Toronto, Vancouver, those festivals would kind of pass on it — but then they’d find a home at Black film festivals like Montreal Black Film Festival, Toronto Black Film Festival or other BIPOC film festivals, like Reelworld,” says Gerrard.
As a mixed-race filmmaker, telling authentic stories about his experience was important to him — and he now does much of that through his production company, Head On Pictures, which he incorporated in 2015.
“I felt that if I have to do post forever, but I get to make these films that really matter to me, then that’s a worthy career,” he says.
Cameron MacLaren, a producer on Gerrard’s short films Inheritance and My Voila and the 2020 feature Space & Time, says Gerrard’s films are deeply entrenched in their sense of humanity.
“Character driven stories are very much the core of what he tells [and] although there are instances that might be personal to him with his culture and his background and having mixed-race parents, there is something fundamentally human about these characters that are always at the forefront of the stories that he tells,” says MacLaren.
Inheritance, a short that screened at the Toronto International Film Festival’s (TIFF) NBA Films for Fans program, is the story of a father and son who grow closer to each other over a love of basketball. A throughline that marks many of his projects, however, is the ties between the characters.
“Space & Time was sci-fi, but it was really about relationships. You look at his NBA short film, it’s about relationships… he is very intuitive about how people interact, and I think he’s got a very interesting perspective. He’s able to find those nuances in the way people relate to each other,” says Warren P. Sonoda, president of the Directors Guild of Canada (DGC) and a longtime colleague of Gerrard’s.
The pair met while working on Odd Squad, in which Sonoda was directing and Gerrard was the post-supervisor, and Sonoda, another 10 to Watch alum, maintains their particular relationship is also symbiotic.
“Mentorship is a two way street,” he says. “As much as [Shawn] might have gleaned information from me, he had great ideas and he would give feedback. So it really was, and still is, a great friendship.”
What’s clear is that the industry is yearning for more voices like Gerrard’s, which led him to become part of the cohort of the TIFF Filmmaker Lab, the WBD Access x Canadian Academy Directors Program and the Netflix-BANFF Diversity of Voices program.
What’s next for the rising star? An upcoming feature called Summer League.
“It’s a film about a co-ed basketball team. It’s going to be a little bit in the mold of He Got Game, or the original White Men Can’t Jump and Love & Basketball. So, we’re hoping to shoot that next year,” says Gerrard.
More immediately, new episodes of Dino Dex that Gerrard directed come out later this fall.
“The political climate of the world [seems to be] recognizing that there needs to be more diverse storytelling, maybe even opening to someone like me who had made a body of work and [is] ready to start doing television,” he says.
Photo courtesy of Shawn Gerrard