Having a production company back your film is essential if you want it seen by a vast audience. Many filmmakers are choosing to forego the middleman and run a production company of their own. We talked to three local Halifax companies who doing just that and making an impression on the indie scene.

– by Melissa Tobin, with files from Steven Woodhead

Fresh Ink Films

Eric Duncan just wants to make horror movies. In 2006, Duncan was fresh out of university and wanted to dive head first into creating his own films. He soon discovered finding the money for this venture was not going to be easy. Duncan met friend Sean Hamilton, and together they set out to make the movies they wanted with their own money. Fresh Ink Films was born.

Moneywise, not much has changed in 2009. Fresh Ink funds all its films, but in the process has produced 14 films to add to its repertoire, including the 2007 film Between the Buried and Me. They are currently working with the Halifax comedy troupe Picnicface on an eight-part webisode.

The big project Fresh Ink was founded on was the 12×12 - 12 movies in 12 months for $1200. Duncan and Hamilton were Fresh Ink’s two-person crew. Over the year, as the movies were made the quality of the production increased.

If Fresh Ink had followed the traditional route of waiting for funding for their films, Duncan says it could have taken the better part of a year to hear back on whether or not they had received approval.

“It was an impatience issue. I knew I wouldn’t learn if I did one project a year,” says Duncan.

Added to the stress on waiting to receive film grants was the fact that many of the grants available were ones Duncan was not qualified for.

“The problem is that there is no funding for the next stage. It’s a catch 22. You can’t get funding because you have no experience, and you can get experience because you don’t have funding.”

Harsh Knuckle

A similar attitude hails from Harsh Knuckle Production. Lead by Karan Sindu and Chad Lindsay, Harsh Knuckle wasn’t going to let a lack of training and funding get in their way.

“We don’t make excuses for ourselves. We don’t wait for money from the government. We don’t wait to get a degree. Screw that. We wanted to make a movie, so we made a movie,” says Sindu.

The movie was The Lot, a 30-minute comedy made with just $150 and a lot of volunteers. Pulling from the Robert Rodriguez handbook on how to make your own films, the two set to make a movie in a setting they knew well, a family business.

“We were taking inventory, seeing what we had to work with. His [Karan's] uncle has a used car lot, so we said let’s make a film, a documentary, about a used car lot,” says Lindsay.

Harsh Knuckle rented a theatre in Halifax on February 5, 2009, to play The Lot on the big screen and toured it around the province. Demand to see the film , stemming from YouTube and Facebook  has spawned a second theatre rental in the city on April 9, 2009.

The decision to form their own production company was one of necessity more than anything, according to Sidhu.

“As long as you’re going to tag that company to everything you’re going to do, put a nice catchy name behind it, and it just looks more professional. I don’t know, I think that if you tag it to everything that you do, people are going to mention it more. They can see what you’ve done.”

What they’ve done is put together a production name that boasts not only The Lot, but the beginnings for a collection of comedic shorts, a 90-minute The Lot feature, and a hush-hush product that Sidhu will only describe as Kingfisher Auto: A Bollywood Musical.

“That’s all I’m going to say,” laughed Sidhu.

Yer Dead

In 2005, filmmakers Rob Cotterhill and Jason Eisener met on the set of Trailer Park Boys. The two talked about what they loved, and hated, about films and realized they had a common interest in the horror genre. Cotterhill was interested in making a documentary on the Halifax burlesque troupe, Pink Velvet, and asked Eisener to come aboard. That was the beginning of Yer Dead Productions.

Since then, Yer Dead has produced the multi-award winning short, Treevenge, which appeared at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

Much like Fresh Ink and Harsh Knuckle, Yer Dead started making films they liked on small budgets all paid from their own pockets.

Now they have proven themselves as filmmakers, making the Yer Dead name and product recognizable, more people are taking notice.

“(Having an established film company) gives us more credentials within the city. It also gives us a better shot at getting funding. It allows the mainstream film industry to pin-point us a little easier. We now have a brand that they can point at, “says Cotterill.

Yer Dead has several other projects in the development stage, including a full length feature, Hobo with a Shotgun. As for the rest of the future, Cotterill still wants to call Halifax home.

“I would love to be a company that focuses on genre movies in Halifax for years to come, whether it be U.S. productions coming here or our home-grown, indigenous stuff. We want to facilitate making the kind of movies we like rather than making movies for money.”