The Television & Film – Business (FTVB) program aims to equip students with the knowledge necessary to perform the tasks that are required within the business side of the television and film industry. Instructor in the program, Chanda Chevannes, explains, “[Students] go through a range of different courses like production accounting, production management, or entertainment law, and they learn about how film and television projects are financed, how they are scheduled, how they are budgeted, all of the legal implications, how to hire crew, and they come out with a really solid understanding of all of the machinations behind the industry.”
Asli Bulut, now a graduate of the FTVB program, took an independent approach to her Storyworks project, which involved a topic that had similar ties to the material she was learning in the program: tax credits.
Chanda explains that tax credits are incentives that the government gives out to try and encourage productions to come to a given location to film. For instance, the Ontario government has various tax credits that try to entice American productions to come to the province, in addition to tax credits that encourage Canadians to hire other Canadians, among others. The tax credit that Asli was interested in was the Ontario Computer Animation & Special Effects (OCASE) Tax Credit.
What is different with this tax credit compared to others is that instead of the producer receiving the credit, the company that creates the animations and special effects for a given production are the ones receiving it. This requires visual effects companies to go to the producers who hired them and inquire about detailed information concerning the production they are creating the content for. “Sometimes those conversations are very hard for people to understand, and it’s hard to know what you need to ask for, so there is a lot of logistical work that goes into getting the tax credit applications ready,” Chanda explains.
This very reason is what inspired Asli to create a solution to the often unclear requirements involved with this tax credit. Chanda says, “Asli wanted to create a document to make that back and forth between the visual effects companies and the clients more seamless, so she created a calendar to show them when they needed to ask for certain documents to have everything together, and she created a checklist so the visual effects company would be able to send a list with everything they need to the client so that the clients could easily see what is required. She even did a comparison between the tax credits that are offered in Ontario for production services and the tax credits that are offered in Atlanta.”
Asli had been working for visual effects company Mavericks VFX, which provided her with the opportunity to make them her Storyworks client. She says, “When I was given the curriculum of Storyworks course, I realized it was a course to push me and my classmates out of our comfort zone of the classroom. I was anxious and excited at the same time because I realized this was going to be the first professional challenge I would face in my career. I had been a part-time receptionist at Mavericks VFX for three months and assisting both the accounting and production department paper works, which gave me an insight into how things work in VFX companies.”
This insight helped her to form her project and pitch the idea. “When a show decides to run their businesses in Canada, all studios go to a bidding war to get the show. The client chooses the best candidate based on their work portfolio, in-house talents and most importantly the tax incentives of the province. The day after we were assigned to the Storyworks project, I booked a meeting with the CEO and pitched my idea: creating a cheat sheet for bidding wars where clients can see the comparison of tax incentives for Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia, and our biggest competitor from the south, Atlanta. For my pitch, I mimicked a standard VFX work deliverable schedule with milestones for my Storyworks deliverable schedule, which helped me to show him that I learned for three months as a receptionist on how production operates in VFX companies.”
After receiving the green light on the deliverables, Asli went to work on creating the cheat sheet. “My first milestone was reading all VFX and Animation Tax Incentives Regulations and Eligibilities of Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia, and Atlanta, and putting together a summary where we can see tax incentive advantages of Ontario compared to other provinces. Then, I moved to determine what are the disadvantages of OCASE compared to other provinces. When I presented those two summaries, the executive producer, the CEO and I picked the most advantageous points of OCASE that would help the company during the bidding war.
My second milestone was designing the cheat sheet. I wanted the colour scheme and layout to represent the company's mission and culture. Also, knowing potential clients will be scrutinizing every visual related to the company, I produced as many drafts as I could. Once we nailed down the design, the most challenging part of the project started was shortening and editing two summaries of my research. It took six drafts to get the final cheat sheet and got a thumbs up from Mavericks VFX.”
After fulfilling the deliverables, Asli received an exciting offer. “When I was called to the CEO’s office to get my signed Storyworks evaluation paper, he asked me when I would graduate from College and if I would be interested in working full-time at Mavericks as VFX Production Assistant,” she explains. This project launched Asli directly into working within the industry, which is one of the key outcomes of Storyworks.
“Storyworks gives students real-world experience, [and] we try to do a really good job at making things very practical. Students do exercises that replicate the work that they would do in the industry, we bring in lots of guest speakers, we teach them networking, and have them go out and find people to interview about their career paths or potential internship opportunities, so there are a lot of ways we try to bring the real world into the classroom, but it’s all still hypothetical until they are actually doing something for a real professional,” Chanda explains. It is the process of bringing the clients and the students together to work on real-world projects, that allows students to put their knowledge into full-gear.
Asli’s work on this project was extremely impactful, as Chanda says, “She really put her heart and soul into the project and came out with a really useful piece of work that was useful for the client, and really used the skills she developed in our program well.”
By: Alexandra Few - A 2020 graduate of the Communications – Professional Writing program at Centennial College who has first-hand experience with Storyworks and is an avid supporter of its push for experiential learning in the classroom.