—and you have lovely weather, so I'm really happy to be here.
I've reviewed everything until now, and today I'd really like to talk about change and hope and how we built a business, my business, CineCoup. We started about three years ago. We were a private, Vancouver-based company, although we really do stretch across the nation. We set out to disrupt the way independent content was packaged, marketed, and financed, beginning with feature film, and recently moved into television as well. In terms of our focus, really we serve mostly 18- to 34-year-olds.
Our partners include on the film side Cineplex, and on the broadcast side right now the CBC. My board and investors include Michael Hirsh from Nelvana, who is now the chairman of DHX; and people like Bob Ezrin and Richard Stursberg, leaders in their field. We've also built a really world-class team of media mavericks to help us see this vision of scaling not only in Canada, but also around the world.
When putting these ideas together, I was going to make a PowerPoint presentation, but I decided that I would just give you a short intro and then let one of our creators, who basically came through our platform, our studio model, tell you about his experience, because I think that's more valuable than my speaking about it.
When I started this company three years ago, people thought I was insane. I said that I believed there was a better way, an accelerated way, a way whereby we could get to market with content faster here in this country and that we could be leaders doing it, but that we had to embrace change and had to embrace acceleration and urgency. I said that we had to look for more private capital, we had to create greater revenue earlier in the system, and basically be more democratic and transparent to allow Canadians, the people, the audience who are the equity, greater decision-making input and democracy in the culture and content they want to see. I also believe that we have to change the model to allow new voices to come into it, specifically on a gender level with International Women's Day yesterday. I'm proud that we've been able to have up to 38% women in our content creators.
The tenet I started this business with was, how do I discover talent where no one else is looking? You don't have to live in Montreal or Toronto or Vancouver. I actually believe that there is more talent in the flyover part of this country aggregated than there is in any single media centre. The great thing about this generation, this social generation, is that technology has been democratized. There are no more gatekeepers. It's easy to find a 2K camera. Non-linear editing comes on every computer. So the differentiator becomes, how do we turn these guys into entrepreneurs? How do we basically create rigour around them so that instead of doing it in two to five years, we get them to do it in 90 days and get to market quickly?
The five tenets that I wanted to set out with my company, and that we've been able to achieve, are:
How do we find talent where no one else is looking? Just to give you an example, Lowell Dean is from Regina, Saskatchewan. That's where this movie was shot, in a province with no tax credits.
The second thing is, how do we find brave, new, original ideas, new IP, new intellectual property, that can be franchised?
The third thing is, how do we build an audience before we start financing a picture, and measure them?
The fourth thing is, how do we reduce discovery costs? I can't afford to read 400 scripts. I can afford to read 40, so I need to come up with a new rigour to do that.
The fifth thing is, how do we use analytics to basically moneyball what's called “marketing spend” so that we're not trying to outspend the Americans in our own market when we bring a movie to market.
The last thing is, if we can achieve this and build a pipeline of low-budget, high-performing content with a built-in audience, that will be the arms race of tomorrow when you look at Netflix and everybody. We shouldn't be trying to answer problems today; we should be building a business where it is three years from now. That's the problem with where we are now. We shouldn't be throwing more money at something basically to shore up a status quo. We need to start experimenting more and take more risk and be braver.
That all being said, I'm going to leave that issue for questions from you guys. But I'd like you to hear the story of Lowell Dean from Regina, Saskatchewan.
We were his last resort; everybody had turned his movie down when he joined our platform. In less than a year, he had a movie in Cineplex. It was sold into 20 countries; on Friday it opened in the Philippines in 20 cinemas; it won a jury award at one of the top film festivals; it has an action figure, a graphic novel, a regular novel; it just sold a thousand pieces of vinyl. And he is making WolfCop 2 in Moose Jaw, where he shot the first one, for three times the budget. This is a cycle that took just under two years.
Without further ado, let me present Lowell Dean and Bernie Hernando, the producer and director of WolfCop, from Regina.
Play the video.