Jul 7, 2011
Pictured: Brendon Sawatzky, Vice President of the Winnipeg Film Group, Rod Bruinooge, MP for Winnipeg South, and Cecilia Araneda, Executive Director of the Winnipeg Film Group.
A Message from our Executive Director regarding Upcoming Equipment Acquisitions:
Yesterday, the Government of Canada announced a contribution of $50,000 to the Winnipeg Film Group through the Canada Cultural Spaces Fund of the Department of Canadian Heritage. This announcement was made by Rod Bruinooge, Member of Parliament (Winnipeg South) on behalf of the Honourable James Moore, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages.
The Winnipeg Film Group will combine this funding with other confirmed funding – including contributions from the Canada Council for the Arts, Canada’s national arm’s-length funding agency, the Winnipeg Foundation and Manitoba Lotteries– to significantly upgrade our specialized equipment. These acquisitions will enable the WFG to better support our mandate, and ultimately better support artists, audiences and the community at large.
The total budget of this equipment acquisitions project is over $125,000.
New tools and systems make the work of individual filmmakers easier, and more possible with limited financial resources, but these tools can be formidably expensive for individual artists to purchase and maintain. Because of this, the Winnipeg Film Group has always functioned as a community centre in many regards, providing access to the core equipment and facilities that are needed to ensure that Manitobans can realistically aspire to direct their own movies within our community and have their works presented to audiences, here and around the world.
With the support of our funding partners, we will, over the course of the next 18 months, develop out a Digital Drop in Lab to provide a creative and dynamic workshop centre that has the most up to date digital post production tools and a flexible projection centre, to support our training and community programs, alongside supporting individual filmmakers. We will additionally acquire a new digital media shelving system for our archival vault. And, finally, we will be able to upgrade our Cinematheque projection equipment to include an HDCAM deck which is backwards compatible to Digibeta, and acquire a new 6K HD projector.
This planned acquisitions package will enable our organization to not only better support the current generation of filmmakers within our community, but also the future generations ? children who are today falling in love with cinema and dreaming one day of being able to make a movie that will be viewed by audiences worldwide.
Cecilia Araneda
Executive Director
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Winnipeg Film Group acknowledges the generous funding support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Cultural Spaces Fund, the Winnipeg Foundation and Manitoba Lotteries for their support of this specialized equipment acquisitions project.
The Winnipeg Film Group additionally acknowledges the generous, ongoing support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council and the Winnipeg Arts Council.
