Last Saturday, Chantal (my long-suffering, patient and lovely wife) and I popped over to the Northern Ontario Film Studios for a wine and cheese reception.
The occasion was the wrap-up of a weekend-long symposium for local film sector people. There were classes, workshops, a trade show — the full gamut. In speaking with folks who attended, I was told 400 to 500 people took part.
The event attracted economic development staff from Greater Sudbury, North Bay and Parry Sound. North Bay’s mayor, Al McDonald even spoke at the event. I’m told Mayor Brian Bigger would have spoken, as well, had he been in the city, but he was in Las Vegas selling Sudbury at the massive MinExpo 2016 conference.
I was surprised. I mean, I knew there were a significant number of people working in the film and television sector, but I didn’t realize it had grown as much as it has in just a few short years.
Since really taking off in 2012 or so, it now employs quite a number of people. Upwards of a 1,000 are working full time making movies and TV shows in the city. That’s not bad for a sector that isn’t even 10 years old.
What’s even more impressive, perhaps, are the year-over-year gains. Since 2012, the number of productions that have set up shop in the city has only grown, as have the millions of dollars spent each year.
Emily Trottier, with the Greater Sudbury Development Corporation, told me in 2014 that 15 productions spent $13 million in the city.
Last year, that number grew to 20 productions that spent $18 million. She pointed out, though, that those numbers don’t necessarily provide the full picture.
If a production is shooting on private property, isn’t using pyrotechnics or hasn’t sought an exemption to an existing bylaw (the noise bylaw, for instance), it doesn’t need a permit, so the city wouldn’t know about it.
So I called David Anselmo, the head of the Northern Ontario Film Studios and a film producer whose production company, Hideaway Pictures, has 18 productions under its belt.
If you check his IMDB (Internet Movie Database) listing, Anselmo has 25 production credits to his name going back to only 2013 — all of them in Northern Ontario.
He’s the guy who convinced Technicolor and William F. White (the largest provider of film production equipment in Canada) to set up shop in Greater Sudbury. I know David. He loves making movies. What’s more though, he wanted to make movies in his hometown, so he set about helping build an environment (the studio) that would allow him to do that — and had a hand in creating jobs for a 1,000 people in the process.
Tax credits are the carrot-on-the-stick luring productions North, but the film studio provides the framework and the infrastructure that makes it easy for productions to keep coming.
Anselmo said the amount of actual money productions have spent is generally about double the city’s numbers. Last year, Anselmo said direct spending was well above $30 million, with spinoff spending of at least three times that amount. That’s a big chunk of change.
In 2016, it appears the spend will be even higher as more — and more expensive — productions find a home in the city and in other parts of the North, like North Bay and Parry Sound. And even there, beyond our borders, Sudbury benefits thanks to the local office of William F. White, which rents equipment to a good portion of the productions that work in the North. Since it’s based in Sudbury, those rental dollars flow back here.
From the outside looking in, we see the lights and the cameras and the stars, and it’s pretty great that people like Ryan Reynolds, Ethan Hawke, Brooke Shields and William Baldwin have worked in our communities. But what impresses me are the numbers and those numbers are big and they’re growing every year.
The film sector is the newest spoke in the wheel of Northern Ontario’s economy, and an increasingly important one. Dotted with one-horse towns that suffer when that horse turns up lame, economic diversification has long been the goal of northern policy leaders.
Greater Sudbury is still one of the world’s great mining jurisdictions, but now we’re also a hub for mining services, the retail sector, medical research and post-secondary education.
And we just happen to be a great place to make movies, too.
And, really, how cool is that?
Mark Gentili is the managing editor of Sudbury.com and Northern Life.
