Local filmmakers receive $50K Telus STORYHIVE grant
Grant to be used to produce their project ‘Ammolite: Gem of the West’
Three local documentary filmmakers have been awarded a $50,000 Telus STORYHIVE grant to produce their passion project “Ammolite: Gem of the West.” Coaldale resident Clayton Varjassy, his twin brother Joel and wife Alison, coowners of Cottonwood Records and Ammolite Documentary Inc., put together the winning proposal and were announced as one of 30 short documentaries out of 293 proposals submitted to receive funding in Alberta and B.C. this year.
“Telus is really open to the public, and it is not like you are just pitching it to Telus but to the public as well,” explained Clayton Varjassy in a recent interview with The Herald. “So you have to prepare a front-end pitch which will be publicly displayed, and will have input from the public on what they want to see. There has always been voting involved in (those projects chosen for funding). For this one, voting was 15 of the 30 projects that were funded; these 15 projects were funded solely on how many votes you received. The other 15 were chosen by panel.”
Varjassy and his team put together a sophisticated social media marketing campaign which targeted those interested in the southern Albertaproduced gemstones in the Chinese and North American markets, garnering 550,000 views.
Ammolite is a rare gemstone mined south of Lethbridge which comes from fossilized ammonite shells dating back 72 million years. Ammonites were sea creatures similar to today’s nautilus which existed alongside the dinosaurs. Korite International, based in southern Alberta, mines and markets 90 per cent of the world’s jewelry quality ammolite which was known as Buffalo Stone (Iniskim) to the Blackfoot people, and is now valued in Chinese Feng-Shui as the “Seven Coloured Prosperity Stone.”
The documentary produced by Varjassy will explore all these aspects of ammonite fact and lore in a creative 3D format.
“We will be shooting everything in 4K (high definition) and Cinema Raw,” Varjassy explained. “We will be integrating as much 3D imagery as we can between now and when the project is due in May. The scope of it is cover ammonite, past, present and future.”
Varjassy is grateful to STORYHIVE and all who voted for his film. He hopes the project will open doors to larger film horizons for his company in the future.
“It validates the effort we put in,” said Varjassy. “Without that grant, (the film) probably wouldn’t be doable. It kind of kickstarts everything. It opens the door to a lot of things because you don’t just get the funding through STORYHIVE, you get mentorship. And it opens the door to other funding like the Alberta Media Fund, and kind of puts you on the radar (for all those kinds of granting agencies).”
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