Wednesday, December 16, 2020

A double shot of podcasts for the Season 3 finale

Tis the season...for what, I'm not sure this year. But one thing we do know is that for the past 9 months some of our best companions have been podcasts. To bring Season 3 of Now & Next, the podcast I host, to a close, a double shot of episodes have just been dropped for your earbud fulfillment. In one we meet an indigenous actor, producer, and filmmaker who as a kid wondered why there was no one who looked like him in Home Alone. Today Jacob Pratt is based in LA, and his latest project is creating Indigenous themed content for Disney. The other episode picks up on this theme of home alone-ing and offers a preview of a forthcoming research report on how people in the game industry are adapting to working from home. Enjoy.

Now & Next Podcast S3 E8 – Isolation Nation: Insights into #WFH

Have you ever said to yourself ‘if only I could work from home whenever I wanted’? And then followed up with a list of all the ways in which it would be better than the daily grind of an uncomfortable commute, overpriced coffee, and hours spent pushing paper and clicking keys at your desk, interspersed with hours in meetings and boxes of muffins? Now, for better or worse, most of us know what that’s like. Spoiler alert: it’s not as great as we thought it would be.

On this episode of  the Now & Next podcast we’re taking a closer look at an industry that was one of the first to go to full work from home mode: the game industry. In some ways it was a fairly straightforward transition, because the majority of developers, designers, producers, and testers were already working independently and on screens for much of the time. But has the transition really been that seamless?

The guests on this episode of the podcast are Marie Claire LeBlanc Flanagan and Jim Munroe. They’re long time game art industry professionals who have been tasked with finding out what the shift to working from home has actually been like for game industry personnel. They’re putting the finishing touches on a research report about the sector’s transition from studio-based work to home-based work called “Isolation Nation”.  Marie and Jim provide us with a sneak peek into some of their interview-based findings so far, such as the challenges of people having to be their own boss at home, the tendency to work too much, as opposed to working too little, and mechanisms for keeping morale up when the opportunities for the usual team building events are limited due to the Covid-19 restrictions.

Marie describes the research project this way: “People are really isolated right now, and I say that’s more the case for people making games, especially small studios. And we think life is easier when people can solve problems together and share knowledge. So the goal of this project is to gather knowledge from people making games all over Canada, in small studios, in larger studios, or people working alone. And then gather that knowledge together into one resource so that people can share the things that they’re struggling with, and how they’re getting past them.”

On this episode, learn more about:
  • How did the gaming industry respond to Covid in terms of getting people set up to work from home? (02:37)
  • How team health is affected by working from home (09:00)
  • Ways studios are trying to build camaraderie and trust with people that joined during the pandemic (11:25)
  • Studios dealing with mental health challenges (15:00)
  • The most surprising discoveries Marie Claire and Jim made from doing this research (18:35)
  • Getting creative work done while being stuck at home during a pandemic (22:30)



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Now & Next Podcast S3 E7 – Breaking On-Screen Stereotypes from the Inside Out 


As a child growing up in southern Saskatchewan Jacob Pratt found himself watching TV – as most kids do – and wondering why he saw no one who looked like him. Jacob grew up on the George Gordon First Nation reserve, about 100 km north of Regina, and remembers that the only images he saw of people from his culture on TV and in movies were stereotypes like people dancing around drums or as members of a tribe from the 1800s riding into town on horseback. 

“Why is there no one that looks like me in Home Alone?”, he thought to himself.


It took several years for Jacob to process, and ultimately answer that question for himself. He built his career in the entertainment industry one step at a time, first as a dancer, then as an actor, and more recently as a producer and director. It was along this journey that Jacob realized that the stereotypical images of Indigenous people he had seen his whole life were not just created by the industry, but reinforced by it. “And then I started thinking to myself, well, how can we reverse or eliminate those stereotypes? And the first answer that came to me was: use the same medium that created and reinforced those stereotypes to reverse them.”

On this episode of the Now and Next, Jacob Pratt talks about his journey from a town of a few thousand people on the prairies to the heart of the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, where he recently completed his Masters at USC, and launched his own company, Skoden Entertainment. Skoden is an Indigenous story-focused entertainment production company whose first client happens to be Disney. But this is not the story of an overnight success. Far from it. While still based in Canada, Jacob hosted, produced, and directed several shows on APTN. And it was while doing an internship at Disney, as part of his Masters program at USC, that he forged the relationships that would lead to his current work with the entertainment industry giant.

On this episode, learn more about:
  • How using the entertainment industry can be a great way to reverse stereotypes created and reinforced by the media (02:20)
  • The biggest challenges in bringing Indigenous stories created by Indigenous filmmakers to a wide audience (6:30)
  • The story of how of Jacob got the deal with Disney (09:00)
  • Skoden Entertainment’s plans to impact Indigenous communities more directly in the future (10:30)



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Monday, December 7, 2020

Making Movies Social Again

If we’re going to be spending so much time alone during Covid-19, we might as well do it together. And not on yet another Zoom meeting. Instead, how about taking the experience of watching a movie, add a group of like-minded individuals, and finish the evening off with some captivating conversation? And do it all at a safe distance online.

That is essentially what Hilary Henegar and Fiona Rayher, the entrepreneurs behind the startup Hoovie are doing. The two friends began organizing in-person events in Vancouver a few years ago that were essentially ‘pop up’ movies. They called them Hoovies, a blending together of the words ‘home’ and ‘movies’.

These events took place in living rooms, in backyards and in basements – anywhere where people could gather and share the experience of watching a documentary, art house movie or film festival award winner together. The evening was capped off with a post-film discussion, usually accompanied by some wine and cheese, and oftentimes the exchange of phone numbers. People were meeting new people and sharing new ideas at Hoovies. Then Covid-19 hit, and like many entrepreneurs, Hilary and Fiona had to adjust their model. “Since Covid, said Fiona, we’ve pivoted. We’ve really tried to bring the magic of what we used to do to the online world.”

On this episode of the Now & Next podcast, we’ll hear from the two BC-based entrepreneurs about what it’s been like shifting their model from people’s yards and homes to their laptops and tablets. As Hilary explains in the interview: “What we know is that there’s this longing people have to interact during the film. As one of our users has said, you can actually feel the audience in the room. And that’s been a real guiding light in how we build the technology.”

And there’s good news for producers too. On top of adding a new social dimension to the viewing experience, Hoovie also provides a new way for filmmakers to reach audiences. Some filmmakers are already finding new audiences in this way while others are using the platform as an additional window, both with a revenue stream attached.

In this episode, hear about:
  • Using cinema as a tool to build online communities (1:40)
  • How food remains an integral part of a movie watching experience, even online (7:00)
  • Why independent films are uniquely suited to a social cinema model (10:30)
  • The new distribution window for filmmakers offered by Hoovie (14:35
  • The story behind how Bob Stein, the founder of the Criterion Collection, fell in love with the Hoovie model (21:53)  




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