Slawko Klymkiw has big plans for the Canadian Film Centre, and they involve the institution stepping out of its role as educator and helping the production community work with new technologies.

As the CFC’s new executive director, his first high-profile initiative, called the Telus Innovation Fund, takes on the thorny but timely megalith called media convergence, which rumbled down the tracks and made itself heard again at this month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Telus provides the seed money to fuel the fund, while the CFC handles the overall design and administration of the program.

The fund will distribute financing of up to $100,000 to small to medium-sized production companies across Canada, for as many as three qualifying projects per year that display unique storytelling content and original ways of reaching cross-platform audiences (read web-based, interactive or mobile).

Klymkiw, former CBC exec head of programming, is adamant that he and his CFC colleagues really have no idea what form ‘innovation’ will take in these projects.

‘We don’t know what the template project looks like for this – and, in fact, our view is that we shouldn’t,’ he stresses. ‘We don’t want the CFC to decide what innovation is. What we want is the CFC to incite people to tell us where innovation is going.’

The surge of mobile-driven content is part of the impetus for the fund from Telus’ perspective, but the process will also enable the CFC to be at the leading edge in helping to create cross-platform content opportunities while the landscape is still being defined.

‘We’re honest about our bewilderment,’ admits Klymkiw. ‘Look at the ways people are playing with content – through telephones, computers, or a virtual mechanism.’

He goes on to point out that the fund will help to decide in some ways where the school should make larger investments in related projects – especially in Habitat, the CFC’s new media lab.

Klymkiw says that the new fund demonstrates the Toronto-based center’s national mandate.

‘I can say this as the new fella on the block,’ he says. ‘This place has very interesting linkages across the country, and around the world. And no one really knows that. They see [the CFC] as a place on Bayview Avenue that inevitably is more Toronto-centric than national. People need to understand the Canadian Film Centre is Canadian. Not simply Ontario, and not simply Toronto.’

The deadline for preliminary project submissions is Feb. 27, following the announcement of application guidelines on Feb. 23. The fund will use a base amount from Telus of $3 million that will support the program for three or four years, before ideally being sustained by the reinvestment of returns from completed projects.

www.cdnfilmcentre.com

www.telus.com