Film school expands to blockbuster proportions
From its humble Yaletown origins, VFS continues ‘ to raise the bar’
Camila Francisco has dreamed about working in animated films ever since she first saw Ice Age more than a decade ago. “I want to make people laugh and cry and have big reactions in front of the big screen,” said the eager 24- year- old Brazilian film student.
So after researching film school options that would help her achieve that goal, Francisco chose a oneyear animation program at Vancouver Film School.
“I came here with almost no knowledge and in two months I made huge progress,” she said. “I never had this experience in Brazil — this amount of time and study spent on one subject.”
Her journey to Vancouver represents a huge evolution for VFS, which began operating in a tiny Yaletown campus with just 12 students in 1987.
Today, about 1,200 VFS students attend classes in a sprawling campus encompassing seven buildings in downtown Vancouver, and about half of its student body come from outside Canada due to recruitment offices in Brazil, Mexico, India, Taiwan and Korea.
The private school, owned by cofounders James Griffin and Richard Appleby, made a huge splash last year when it took over 112,000 square feet of city- owned space in Gastown that used to house the Storyeum theatrical museum.
That gives VFS about a quarter of a million square feet of space in the downtown core.
“Having this space now gives us the ability to branch out and raise the bar in terms of our physical presence downtown,” VFS managing director Marty Hasselbach said in an interview this week. “We feel very confident that we’re positioned to become the next generation of what a film school should be.”
The old Storyeum space now houses a new 42,000- square- foot VFS animation and visual effects campus and more film students will move into the facility this year when further renovations are completed.
Hasselbach said VFS chose to take the Gastown space after being wooed by Great Northern Way Campus to move its entire campus to east Vancouver — something it turned down because of the cost and logistics involved.
The expansion- minded film school also considered moving to the suburbs.
“We had talks with some of the outlying communities, but we’re the Vancouver Film School — not the Burnaby or Richmond Film School,” Hasselbach said. “The downtown core is a big important piece of who we are because of its vibrancy and the fact the ( movie) industry is located all around here.”
VFS employs 450 people and most instructors remain active in the industry. About 15,600 students have graduated from the school since it opened 27 years ago and its student body has doubled in size in the past decade: from 600 to 1,200.