Days 15-17: Incorporating Corporation

Editing takes up our entire days now, from wake up to sleep time, Brad is primarily the one working on the trailer and he's putting in a tremendous amount of time, leaving the research and organization of shoot dates, to me and Myles. Some days we don't even leave the "office" we've constructed in Myles' Mom's basement (which we've moved around and re-jigged since it's original construction). This all means that anytime we have a reason to go out into the real world, it's actually fairly unsettling. At least for me, because I tend to acclimatize myself to indoor life a little too much if left unsupervised.

Sometimes I feel like I'm a house cat that doesn't know what to do with itself if you let it outside.

One of these outdoor excursions happened on Sunday when PJ called us down to his home, as has become a bi-weekly occurrence, but this time to film a pitch video for the CBDC, a governing municipal body that gives entrepreneurial grants to small businesses. In typical PJ fashion he called us down with only a vague Idea of what he wanted from the video, and the assumption that editing a 5 minute pitch video and throwing it up on youtube would be insanely quick and easy. It might have been if PJ and the other two CAL inc. board members hadn't talked on Camera for about 45 minutes...

But PJ has become a friend to us so we decided to do the best we could for him, and edited the video down to a lean 18 minutes, and sent it off, albeit a little later than PJ had wanted it, but was much higher quality than it would have been if we followed PJ's suggestion of "Just do it on an iPhone, it'll be fine."

We capped off that Sunday with a long overdue viewing of Anchorman and an episode of Doctor Who, which, if your wondering, is a great combination.

The next day found us working hard all day editing and planning for our meeting with a small buisness consultant the following day. We were inside working so long that by the time 8 o'clock rolled around we'd been working for about 16 hours straight, so we decided to just go for a drive. To wherever the wind would take us! Well, so long as the wind took us to somewhere with a hot meal and maybe a nice cold beverage to go with it.

"The Wind" ended up taking us to downtown Halifax, where we spent about an hour walking around in search of the harbour, which is much easier to find than we made it. We kind of had this vague idea of heading towards "The Ocean" but the end goal, being not established, wasn't a primary concern. We instead were taking joy in the simple act of stretching one's legs outdoors in a beautiful city on a peaceful monday night. We made jokes and laughed loudly into the mostly empty streets of the harbour front.

I visited this part of Halifax six years ago with my family, it was a hot day and we arrived, spontaneously into the middle of a massive Busker's festival, featuring musicians, acrobats, jugglers, magicians and more. It was a very bright and bustling atmosphere with the smell of freshly made fish 'n chips, beaver tails and hot dogs wafting over you as you walked along taking in the various performances, It's where I played the then new Xbox 360 for the first time (I don't know why they were demoing it at a street performance festival), and we all spent time climbing all over the playground that's shaped like a boat. There's also a life size version of Theodore the Tugboat you can look at. It's one of the days I remember most from any of our vacations as a family, it's the memory that's always made me want to go back to Halifax.

And there I was. Standing on the same spot the tightrope walker had done his act six years before, looking over at Theodore Tugboat and the playground shaped like a boat!

I was able to recall everything, yet it seemed so long ago that I'd been here last. I wasn't even in high school yet. It's strange to think how much life can change in six years. I was looking at it all through a fresh set of eyes, the eyes of a 20 year old film maker, not a 14 year old still scared about what high school will bring his way.

My sentiment was somewhat lost on the others, who, instead of being distracted by the facets of my childhood, found a pub on the edge of the warf, where we sat down, ate some more delicious seafood, and shared a pitcher of "The Pride of Nova Scotia" (Keith's). After much merriment and exuberance, and with our bellies truly full, we made the journey back to the car, remarking loudly about how wonderful a city Halifax was, and how great it would be if we could just get the funds together to start a production company out here.

The Barenaked Ladies provided the soundtrack to our return journey from Halifax, which found me in the drivers seat, because not only had I not had more than one glass of Lager (with a meal, over an hour before, for your information mother),  but also because, without his glasses Brad can hardly see at night at all, so it would be unwise to put him in the driver's seat.

That all brings us to today. Where this vague idea of forming a production company reared it's ugly head of specifics. We met with Paul Beasant, a small business adviser at the New World Merchant Bank, a company that finds financial solutions for start ups and entrepreneurs, at a coffee shop in Bedford. He told us how specifically one actually becomes a company and what has to be done from a legal perspective (well, he told us that we'd have to see a lawyer),  as well as different financial grants and small business loans and such. It was clear before we even went in there that incorporating ourselves was going to have to be a step we'd take eventually, even just to apply for any government funding, funnily enough no one wants to just give three random 20-somethings 30 grand, couldn't tell you why. It became even clearer to me as I was sitting there that we were only just now getting to the things we should have done before we left, you know, like make a business plan.

But that's kind of the beauty of what we're doing; We dont know what we're doing.

We're so indie, we're actually unsure how to make an indie film. Because as it turns out there's a heck of a lot of money that goes into even the lowest budget movies, and it's not easy to come by. But that's not going to stop us telling this story. It just might make it a little interesting.


Acquire experiences, not possessions.

-Matt