I’ve Been Working in This Industry for Seven Years. The Industry I Trained For Is Unrecognizable. Is That Terrifying or the Best Thing That’s Ever Happened to Us?
Seven years ago I made a deliberate pivot into film and television production. For the past six of those years I’ve been grinding through Vancouver’s industry as a production coordinator and executive producer’s assistant on shows you’ve probably watched. Good work. Real work. The kind of work I set out to do.
But the math stopped mathing. And I don’t just mean personally.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
BC’s total film and TV production spending dropped 29% year over year in 2023 — from $3.3 billion across 511 projects down to $2.3 billion across 346 projects. That’s not a blip. That’s a structural shift.
After the dual Hollywood strikes halted productions for roughly 150 days, BC’s Minister of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport reported that hiring in the industry was down more than 80% by the end of 2023.
Nationally, the CMPA’s Profile 2024 reported that total Canadian production volume declined 18.5% compared to the prior year. That report came with an unusually candid note from CMPA President Reynolds Mastin that the numbers “starkly confirm the significant economic slowdown that Canadian producers and creators have faced over the past 18 months.”
What I Watched From the Inside
I watched budgets shrink while expectations didn’t. I watched crews get smaller while the workload stayed the same. I watched the conversations in production offices shift from “what are we making next” to “how do we survive until the next greenlight.” I watched talented people exhaust themselves chasing work that was increasingly scarce, increasingly underpaid, and increasingly dependent on decisions made in boardrooms we’d never enter.
And I watched something else: the people who were quietly, stubbornly building something outside that system.
The Industry I Trained For Is Gone. Good.
Here’s the thing nobody says out loud at industry events: the model we were all trained to serve wasn’t actually working for most of us. It was working for a small number of people at the top of a very tall pyramid, and the rest of us were competing for the privilege of supporting their vision with our labour while they retained the IP, the backend, and the creative control.
The strikes cracked it. The streamers’ spending panic cracked it further. The tariff uncertainty is cracking it again. And every crack lets in light.
I’m not mourning the old model. I’m done waiting for it to recover.
What I’m Building Instead
I’m coming home to Vancouver Island to build a mid-Island independent production hub. Not a production company in the traditional sense; something closer to a cooperative. A place-based creative ecosystem where the crew are the collaborators, where the IP stays with the people who make it, where the stories are rooted in this landscape and these communities.
I don’t need a broadcaster to greenlight what I’m building. I need talented people who are tired of waiting for permission. I need stories worth telling. I need a community willing to build something together.
So Is It Terrifying?
Yes. Stepping off the service production treadmill, betting on yourself and your community instead of the next American show that may or may not land in Vancouver — that’s not comfortable.
But I’ve spent six years being comfortable inside a system that was slowly, then suddenly, falling apart. The terror of building something new is cleaner than the exhaustion of propping up something broken.
The industry I trained for is unrecognizable. And I think that might be the best thing that’s ever happened to us.
