Allison Outhit is the VP, television and business affairs, of Collideascope Digital Productions, a Halifax-based convergence and iTV production company. In this article she talks about how Canadian producers, particularily on the East Coast, can weather the storm of economic uncertainty

Collideascope president Steve Comeau and I hoped for a schadenfreude-filled week. For confirmed acolytes in the Church of Bad Taste, what better venue than Las Vegas to bask in the weird neon of excess? Neither of us having attended before, we had been promised NATPE would surpass our gleeful anticipation of loud, proud American-style pomp. We yearned to bathe in the glow of 30-watt sitcom stars while whole warrens of booth bunnies forced armfuls of swag upon us.

One look at the conference floor told us our dreams were to be crushed. Attendance at NATPE this year was drastically reduced; the majors had hiked up their skirts and retreated to the rarer air of the Venetian Hotel. The Convention Center’s deserted, rodeo-fenced cafeteria induced imaginary tumbleweeds, while the long rows of near-naked, utilitarian cubicles gave an impression of flotsam-built shelters huddled together on some long-forgotten beachhead. Executives prowled the corridors looking for hot tips: Where were the deals? The big budget rollouts? Is anybody hiring?

It is no doubt a truism, but if there is one arena in which the Atlantic Canadian production community has expertise, it is the tightening of belts. In fact, our belts have rarely been loosened – even the grander productions continually get by on a few threads short of a shoestring. We’ve been able to survive by being multi-taskers – executive producers manage everything from financing to line production, script editing to post supervision. Grips are often known to gaff; playback, continuity and set dec roll into one sturdy PA. Almost no one can be said to be overpaid; we fetch our coffee from Tim’s, not Starbucks. Starbucks hasn’t even deigned to set up shop in downtown Halifax. Could they know there’s no money in it?

That is not to say that other regional communities have been spending hand over fist. These are hard times for everyone, and the cloak of austerity is just as unappealing in Vancouver as it is in St John’s. The same question is on everyone’s lips: How do we survive, let alone prosper?

The talk at NATPE was all about co-production, the single most effective spade I can think of with which to start digging our way out of the trench. Outside the U.S. industry, this is old news. Not only independent producers, but also broadcaster-based Canadian and European production entities have been devising flexible new transnational strategies for financing and producing competitive programming. Even for big players such as Canal+, sharing territories (proprietary and financial) has been the only way to bring big creative to the small screen. This is no doubt an irritating development for those conglomerates that had staked the entire sandbox for their own.

But you don’t need the whole sandbox to build a castle when a couple of pails will do. With few exceptions, the Canadian production community is comprised of a multitude of little diggers. If we want to play, we have to play together – meaning inter-regional sharing of resources – two-, three- and four-party co-productions. Atlantic Canada offers some outstanding production incentives in terms of world-class production facilities, talented crew, creative dealmakers and aggressive tax relief. There is little to prevent ‘non-regional’ producers from making friends with their Eastern neighbours, aside from, perhaps, the occasional bout of ‘entitlementitis,’ from which we all occasionally suffer.

This so-called downturn is an interesting time for Canadian production. There’s been quite a bit of grumbling from our neighbours to the south, who can’t help but feel threatened by the steady growth of the Canadian industry. Broadcasters here and abroad appear to be reducing acquisitions mere moments after launching whole flights of new channels. But even in producer math, two and two still equals four. People are still watching TV, channels are still on the air, and libraries can only be re-purposed so many times before the cry must go up for new product. All of this means a diverse and co-operative production community will continue to succeed.

Take it from a Maritimer: When the big fish are gone, the sea suddenly teems with clusters of healthy little fish. They swim on and grow strong, relieved at least of the fear of being gobbled up.

-www.collideascope.com