You're quite right, and those who have told the story of how series have become a dominant storytelling form in the screen industries are bearing out all our experiences. Many more people watch and enjoy series and feel that television series are as good an experience for the viewer as a feature film.
That's reflected also in how our members work. We work a great deal in television series, and by television series I mean serialized entertainment on all platforms, and many of our members work in feature film.
I would draw one key distinction, which I think is of interest to this committee in one way, and that is one of our most distinguished members is Clement Virgo, who is the writer, director, and producer of The Book of Negroes, which started as a feature film project and became a miniseries, as did Orphan Black by the way, a well-known Canadian series.
Clement draws the distinction between his work as a filmmaker on the one hand and on the other hand as a hard-hat director, as he calls it. By a hard-hat director he means the way he spends his time when he's offering his services as a gun-for-hire director on any number of projects around the continent.
He has directed The Wire, a famous HBO series. He is very active in Canadian episodic, but he does draw a distinction between that work and the work he does as a feature filmmaker primarily, but also as a feature filmmaker working in formats like the miniseries, for instance, The Book of Negroes, or for example, a series that he may have conceived himself, written, or put together with fellow writers.
In the end it goes to authorship. What feature film has tended to do in our low-budget environment, an environment in Canada where we don't have a lot of money, is it has allowed individuals like me to be both the writers and directors of a single work and therefore the authors of that work.
A series tends to take me and put me in just a little part of it. I'll direct one or two episodes, and I'm certainly not the writer of that series. It's using my skills and my craft, but it may not really be drawing on me as the total progenitor of that project.
I think what's great and worth sustaining in the focus on feature film is that this 90- to 120-minute thing is likely to be a very authored thing in Canada and in some sense have its own voice and be its only story, a story that can go to festivals and go into cinemas and onto television around the world, with a kind of specificity that may be more representative of the story I want to tell than the larger format series.
In a sense, it's simply an instrumental difference between the two functions. That is what I meant when I said that feature film employs me more totally as an artist than series most often, but it's not exclusively the case.