There’s one simple rule Kathleen Gilbert says the film industry in Victoria can always count on: “when it gets very busy over there [Vancouver], the lower budgets have difficulty,” the commissioner of the Vancouver Island South Film and Media Commission told Business In Vancouver.
“Over the last two weeks we’ve seen a fairly substantial increase in requests for [Victoria] location packages.”
While 2016 isn’t shaping up to be a banner year for Victoria the way 2015 was, when two-dozen productions hit the capital region, Gilbert said the fall and winter will be particularly busy as more productions spill over from the Lower Mainland.
Lori Massini, an entertainment lawyer at Boughton Law, said the ongoing boom in the Vancouver film sector has created a “bizarre exodus” of local producers leaving the Lower Mainland for regions that can support lower-budgeted productions.
“I’ve never seen Vancouver this busy in my entire career,” said Massini, who helps producers with the legal wrangling required for securing locations and crews.
“The challenge facing producers right now is that nobody can hire crew, so if you’re a Canadian producer with a modest budget, you can’t compete with a studio production with a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars that’s going to offer local crew more lucrative and long-term employment.”
Jon Summerland, commissioner of the Okanagan Film Commission, said his region’s “bread and butter” has always been the lower to mid-budget productions.
“And my crew has been poached to Vancouver as soon as Vancouver exploded,” he said.
Most producers have been coming to the Okanagan with the expectation they can film the entire production in the Interior, but Summerland said now “more people are kicking tires than showing up.”
Another issue, he said, is the high cost of Okanagan accommodation during the summer.
A production recently passed on filming in the region because hotel rooms were too pricey. Summerland said they’ve since been calling him twice a week to express regret after it cost them $40,000 to cover parking fees in downtown Vancouver.
“That is way more than what they would have to pay for accommodation costs here,” he said. “So they’re coming back here in August.”
The region typically has enough workers to support two productions filming simultaneously.
The Okanagan Film Commission is also preparing to announce that a production company will film six movies back-to-back in the region through to the end of the year.
“So that is bringing my crew back because they’d rather be home doing my show than [working] in Vancouver,” Summerland said.
Meanwhile, Gilbert said Victoria’s workforce can support a maximum of two or three productions filming simultaneously.
But since late last year, about eight department heads have moved to Victoria from Vancouver, further bolstering the crew base.
“And most of them say it’s the real estate that’s driving them over here,” Gilbert said.
Liz Shorten, managing vice-president of the Canadian Media Producers Association’s B.C. branch, likens the province’s film industry to a wheel.
“If we can think of the Lower Mainland as a bit of a hub, [then] the spoke is moving out,” she said. “This is all good news in terms of trying to expand the footprint of the industry beyond the Lower Mainland and the City of Vancouver.”
@reporton
