Update From the Chair
Nearing the 2013 halfway mark, it has been an eventful year across the BC motion picture industry and I think that the production community has made a great deal of headway understanding our industry’s value proposition to the Province of British Columbia.
More importantly, I think we have learned how critical it is for us to convey the story of our industry to the broader stakeholder groups across business, community and government audiences . Taking it a step further, we need to engage these groups in our story — as long as the collective investment in BC’s production industry is from both the private and public sectors, we are in this together and must maximize every opportunity to collaborate on our industry strategy, communications and vision for the future — because as it has been said, “it belongs to all of us”.
Going forward this year, MPPIA Executive continues to carry out work in a couple of areas that we believe will help inform the production industry’s economic impact; as well, we are exploring and developing ways to work together across the broad spectrum of BC’s screen based industries in a manner that will help us maximize our value to one another,to the newly established Creative BC, and to the Province of British Columbia. MPPIA is additionally examining its own structure and capabilities, and exploring ways to improve both.
Specifically, in these above noted areas, MPPIA is currently engaged in the following:
Working closely with BC Statistics to reconcile industry and government models measuring economic impact;
Sourcing production case studies to build stand alone economic impact ‘snapshots’ that portray the industry’s economic reach in an accessible manner;
Identifying the best opportunities to advance the We Create BC brand, and looking at ways to engage as many stakeholder groups in BC in the initiative;
Working together across the production industry supply chain, including municipal government partners, to ensure British Columbia is putting its best competitive food forward and projecting an ‘open for business’ message to all of our clients, per Creative BC’s ‘Partners on Screen’ program;
These are areas in development right now — we will update again in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I encourage you to help populate the We Create BC social media space with industry stories of every kind — production anecdotes, company snapshots, individual contributions, successes, events, social contributions and industry legacies — help us aggregate the great news story of our industry so we can build it into theWe Create BCwebsite . We Create BC can become the celebration of decades of achievement in our creative industries and a signpost to our future success if we strategically work together on a collective vision.
On the topic of visionaries, this Monday June 24 we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Stephen J. Cannell Classic Golf Tournament — our annual industry fundraiser that has raised in excess of a quarter of million dollars for charity since it was established by BC industry builder Stephen J. Cannell in 1988. This tournament is a tradition on the production industry’s event calendar, renamed as a tribute to its founder three years ago. The giving that takes place during the event is enormously generous and is only one small example of the community giving that takes place across the industry throughout the year. Fittingly, the tournament was sold out this year and the wet weather did not stand in the way of the spirit of this event — we fulfilled our fundraising goal of $20k, which will go to this year’s beneficiaries — The Greater Vancouver Foodbank, MindCheck and the MPPIA Short Film Award. Thank you to the many sponsors, participants and volunteers who support the tournament year after year. It is just one testament to what we can accomplish when we work (or play) together.
Peter Leitch, Chair