Local new media creators heading to Baltics
Production company plans to shoot web series in area next year after return from accelerator
WATERLOO — An eight-part web series called “La Boheme” will begin shooting in KitchenerWaterloo next year after the creators return from a unique media-technology accelerator in Tallinn, Estonia.
Gada Jane, a local filmmaker and research associate at the University of Waterloo’s Games Institute, was accepted into the 10-week program at the Storytek accelerator and content creation hub. It’s all about bringing together content creators and new media technology.
Storytek loved the proposal for “La Bohème,” a web series that tells the story of an artist who drops her creative ambitions to make a reality TV show.
“They were enthusiastic and encouraging from the beginning,” Jane said.
Storytek also loved what Jane and the creative startup she cofounded, Velvet Icons Productions, plan to do with the web series.
It will be screened on YouTube, and there will be an online store where viewers can buy works created by the artists appearing in the series. An Instagram account will also be created to support both the series and the online shop.
“We are developing multiplatform productions that place storytelling at the intersection of e-commerce, social media and lifestyle culture,” she said.
Jane wrote, directed and edited the 2016 feature film “John Orpheus is Dead,” which was filmed in downtown Kitchener.
It premièred at the Apollo Cinema, and was screened at the Nice International Film Festival in France. It was about celebrity in the internet age.
More recently, she co-founded Velvet Icons Productions with Victoria Buchy and Flore de Bayser.
Buchy is an experienced arts administrator who led the Toronto Children’s Chorus and was director of operations for the Glenn Gould Prize. De Bayser represents the Belgian film fund Wallimage in Canada after working in oil trade finance in Paris.
Buchy and de Bayser work out of Toronto, but Jane and the production company are based in Waterloo in order to maintain a close association with the University of Waterloo’s Games Institute.
Jane said the production company wants to collaborate using virtual reality and augmented reality in new media productions, and the institute will play an important part in that work.
The web series and online store associated with it create a mesh of links among the artists and their works that viewers can explore, she said.
“Think of it as bringing artists together and creating a digital map on the internet where you are linking these different projects the artists are working on,” she added. “So it is creating channels for the audience to move through and discover.”
In July, Jane travelled to Montreal to represent the Games Institute at the Fantasia International Film Festival. Associated with the festival is a power-networking event for Canadian and European filmmakers called Frontières Market. That’s where Jane first met representatives from Storytek.
“We had a meeting, we explained what we were doing, we kind of described the project, and they got very excited about it and invited us to apply,” she said.
Jane and Buchy fly to Tallinn on Tuesday. De Bayser will join them later for the last part of the program.
“We are in development and ready to go into production when we come back,” Jane said.