New media under the tree for CIFVF?

An independent production fund that until four years ago was one of the few sources of funding for new media projects without broadcast licensee partners hopes 2007 will be the year it gets back into the new media game. With its funding reduced and an uncertain environment for technology-based projects after the dot-com boom-and-bust, the Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund (CIFVF) announced its last round of new media funding recipients in January 2003 (CNM, Jan. 15/03)."I just got discouraged, because a lot of the projects that we funded didn’t come to fruition, because they couldn’t get financed," Robin Jackson, executive director of the fund, says of the atmosphere in early 2003.The decision to drop new media from the list of eligible projects was a tough decision for CIFVF’s board of directors, but logical given many of them have backgrounds primarily in traditional film and video. "When we took the initial hit they sort of said ‘Look, our initial mandate has been film, so I’m afraid it’s new media that has to go,’" Jackson says. "Now that life is changing, they’re saying ‘We have to move with the times,’ so we’ll take anything in multiplatform."After appearing before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage last month with fund co-chair Jean-Louis Robichaud, (CNM, Dec. 13/06), Jackson learned that a budget of $1,529,542 had been approved for the fund by the Department of Canadian Heritage, carrying it through until its next payout of grants in April 2007. Earlier this year, the fund had received stopgap funding for the 2006-2007 period that left it covered from April until the end of September. However, since the fund had been holding only one deadline and funding grant since the same time new media was dropped in 2003, Jackson was uncertain that enough funding to pay out to all successful applications would emerge by spring 2007.And with Heritage’s policy that independent production funds must spend all their budgets by March 31 of the next year in order to receive another instalment of funding, Jackson says she was forced to take a leap of faith. "You know what we did? We gambled," she says. "I found out November 28 that they were going to renew it – how could I have held a deadline and gotten the money out by March 31 ? It would have been virtually impossible."The welcoming of new media-type projects back into the fold doesn’t mean there’ll be any more money for such endeavours, however; Jackson stresses it’ll likely be the same funding pie, just cut into smaller slices. Its 2005-2006 funding round, which closed for applications on March 16, 2006, recently saw $1,600,001 paid out in grants to 68 film and video projects.However, with the Conservative minority government casting close scrutiny over nearly every facet of government spending – especially those initiatives dedicated to the arts – there’s still some uncertainty in the CIFVF’s future. And as is often the case with independent funds, there is some overlap between the various bodies on the question of who should fund digital media and how – and even more questions on how to define the disciplines of "new" media, interactive media, and multimedia."I went to a consultation that the Canadian Television Fund had, and yes, they were interested in multiplatform," Jackson says, a development which means another likely competitor for project applications and funding. "Then, when the question came up about interactive, they said…no. So, there seems to be a line drawn between yes, we’ll repurpose it for cell phones and iPods, but we’re not necessarily going to go into interactive."

New media under the tree for CIFVF?

Broadcast | December 21, 2006

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