Indie power Local filmmakers vie for $1-million CineCoup contest prize.
Edmonton auteurs vie for $1 million in CineCoup contest
On Monday, a team of three Edmonton filmmakers will compete for a chance to earn a $1-million budget for their movie.
The team is one of five — narrowed down from 120 over the last three months — pitching their projects in front of a live audience in Banff Monday to top off the CineCoup Film Accelerator’s second competition.
If $1 million seems paltry compared to your average summer blockbuster — which might drop $300 million, especially if it’s an action flick — it’s huge for independent producers who are used to making movies on a shoestring.
Writer/director Aaron Kurmey and writer/producers Ryan Hatt and Kevin Johnson have been friends and filmmakers since their elementary and high school days in Lethbridge. They’ve been making movies together since they were kids, and their production company, Rambunxious Entertainment, has three features under its belt.
They’re hoping their CineCoup entry, High School Brawl, will make it four.
High School Brawl follows Chester, a disgraced prefect in a state-of-the-art juvenile correctional facility called the Noble Academy.
“This is a new thing where they’re trying to rehabilitate these kids early on through art class and by having a certain amount of discipline and respect, with the suits (they’re wearing),” says Kurmey.
“But the kids are still bad criminal kids, so they run in gangs.”
In short, the Dead Poets Society-goes-to-lockdown approach ... “It’s not working,” says Hatt.
Thanks to the CineCoup Film Accelerator — a company aiming to change the way films get made, marketed and financed — the team behind High School Brawl got a chance to create on a much larger scale.
“The budget is nothing to laugh at,” says Johnson.
“This movie, especially, is the right movie to make for a million. Sometimes, you might be overly ambitious and think that a million can take you further than it actually can.”
The CineCoup Film Accelerator calls itself “a disruptive studio model for indie filmmakers,” offering a yearly contest available to any Canadian team who wants to make a feature film. The inaugural competition, in 2013, was won by Regina writer/director Lowell Dean for his werewolf/cop movie WolfCop, which received $1 million and a Cineplex theatre release.
“A million-dollar budget is amazing, but to me the real reason to enter this was that theatrical (release),” Dean told CBC News after winning. “That’s the dream of any Canadian filmmaker.”
Through its socially connected and interactive website, CineCoup allows fans to follow along from the initial submissions (the first, which was due back in March, was a one-minute trailer), and vote along the way — whittling the field down from 120 to 60, 30, 15, then finally five teams of three.
In keeping with CineCoup’s fast pace — the winning film gets released a year after it’s officially green-lit — the contestants go through a rigorous “mission” process, each week completing a new assignment that runs the gamut from making a movie poster to creating videos that showcase their unique vantage point or hawk their project to the media.
Eventually, CineCoup’s film expertise takes over, and the company selects the five finalists.
This year, those finalists will present to a panel of industry judges during CineCoup’s Big Deal Event, which happens during the Banff World Media Festival.
The sole Alberta finalists, Kurmey, Johnson and Hatt are competing against two projects from Vancouver and two from Toronto.
While all five films will be optioned for development, only one is guaranteed the $1 million in financing and the theatre release.
“We have to get onstage in front of 200 people and pitch our movie to the audience,” says Kurmey. “There’s also a panel of judges there who are going to be critiquing our pitch.”
The group has an extended two-minute trailer to show, as well as a video that will reiterate the key elements that make their project worthy.
But before the judges make their final decision, there’s a question period.
“They warned us that this is supposed to be pretty intense,” says Johnson.
“They interrogate us,” adds Hatt.
“This movie, especially, is the right movie to make for a million.”
Kevin Johnson
“They’re going to try to make us cry,” says Kurmey, chuckling.
Tears or no, the filmmakers are glad for the experience.
John son says that the weekly grind has made them more efficient.
“We’ve worked with time-crunches before, but we’ve never had a week-t-o-week schedule like this — where we have to get these missions out.
“And every week we wanted to do as well as the last, because we wanted to be near the top of the competition. So we’ve put a lot of hours into the short weeks that we had.”
Win or lose, they’ve grown a lot in their art.
“The whole experience with CineCoup has been a lot of fun. It’s also been very intense. But it’s a really cool way for filmmakers who don’t have access to a lot of money to bring their project to the table and try to expand it,” says Kurmey.
“The best thing for us has been the fan interaction throughout — because for each mission, you can see where your movie’s going, if it’s going in the right direction, or if it’s
totally missing the mark.” The Big Deal takes place Monday, June 8 at the Banff World Media Festival. To see clips of the five film projects vying for the $1- million prize, including Edmonton’s High School Brawl, go to cinecoup.com