Young filmmakers are fortunate to be living, learning, and working in a time where numerous film production funding opportunities, grants and scholarships are available to help them bring their stories to life. In Canada, you can find opportunities like this available locally, provincially, and even federally.
For today, we’d like to take a closer look at one or two filmmaking grants in particular that our students have taken home here at our college in Kelowna.
The grant winners for the 2020 STORYHIVE & Reel Youth Community Stories were announced in December 2019. To our immense joy, Digital Filmmaking students from Kelowna’s Centre for Arts and Technology (CAT) were awarded a $10,000 grant to be put towards a filmmaking project!
The recipients of the grant were Digital Filmmaking students Jared White, Morgan Thomas, Nash Madrigga, Georgia Spalding and Anibal (Mo) Blandon Chavarria (and who would be supported by other students from their cohort).
The purpose of the grant was to create a short documentary film exploring the topic of ‘digital citizenship’ and to better understand how today’s ongoing on-line interaction impacts young people’s lives in our increasingly digital age.
To bring the project to fruition, the grant winners attended a weekend-long Reel Screen winner’s workshop in Kelowna, taking place on CAT’s campus in February 2020.
The February workshop consisted of team building exercises, skills development sessions, and served as an opportunity for them to pitch their film idea to the rest of the participants and receive constructive feedback and help. As an added incentive to attend, finished projects would later be featured on select Telus platforms for streaming in 2020.
“Having organizations like Reel Youth and Storyhive engage with our students pre and post-graduation is a real win-win situation. These grants offer our grads invaluable opportunity to apply their freshly minted filmmaking skills to real-world productions, which enables them to add valuable experience to their resumes.” – Victor Poirier, Department Head, CAT Digital Filmmaking.
CAT students are fortunately no strangers to receiving grants and other awards to help fund their passion projects and cinematic visions.
CAT Digital Film student Hayley Morin (assisted by members of her graduating cohort Courtenay Louie, Matthias MacLeod and Vince Eger) had earlier won a $50,000 grant in the Storyhives’ 2018 Indigenous Edition’ competition. The funding from the grant allowed for the production and completion of her documentary ‘The Crying Fields’, which was released in July 2019.
Are you passionate about professional filmmaking but worried about your prospects of either breaking into the movie industry or having the means to bring your projects to life? , fashion, and design? Numerous graduates from our Professional Filmmaking program have found success landing positions with production houses and winning grants to allow them to self-produce their projects!
Check out more professional filmmaking student reviews here!
If you’re curious to know more, fill out our online inquiry form and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible!
