When you are just starting out as a producer you basically just have to get some stuff actually made.  That’s the first hurdle.  Then maybe you work toward making something good.  Then you are going to want to start doing projects that are larger than your credit card limit.  That’s been the hurdle Scott and I have been at for the past few projects, but being a recipient of the Independent Production Fund has even bigger implications for my life.  It has given me the opportunity to produce full time for the first time since I was on EI in 2002.

So this Monday marked a major milestone for me as the beginning of the first week free from the hum-drum of office life.  No more commute to Scarborough, no more coffee room pleasantries.  Although I might buy Courtney a cake for being awesome (its time to form our own little rituals), those office antics that have found their way into our past shows are over with for now.  Well it didn’t start all that different, in fact that snooze button was even more inviting than usual.  I did enjoy eating at home and running my own schedule, didn’t really get out except for a trip to the store so that’s some thing I have to work on.  I love the skype calls with Scott and Courtney, where we all look at the same documents and generate a real feeling of moving forward.

Scott, Courtney and I have very different backgrounds so we have very different perspectives.  Unfortunately I’m the one handling the financial realities and repercussions of our productions, and that hasn’t changed in this project.  The big difference…lots of extra zeros.  Its funny how things change when there is a larger pool of money.  We never before ventured into E&O insurance, which a requirement of the IPF and is high on our minds now as because its a large line item in a budget that needs to cover a massive project.  Otherwise we are still working at a fraction of television industry standards.  The Tights and Fights: Ashes project will produce content at an estimated cost of under $300/minute, a far cry from both the $10′s of thousands per minute of traditional television fiction, and the $100 per minute target of our previous projects.

I wanted to write a little about the process of applying to this grant in particular, because I actually found it very helpful and would recommend this fund to all developing producers.   There were two stages in the application process.  The first one asked for an impossibly short 6 page outline of the project.  Smart, because who wants to read 166 hundred-page applications?  From that a committee narrowed it down to 26.  Of that they awarded funding to 11 teams.  That two stage process and meetings we had with them really helped us form a solid proposal.

Anyway, all in all…I could really get use to this.