Of all the arts to which Vermont is home, filmmaking remains an outlier, a collaborative pursuit whose practitioners live out in the weeds.
Film projects conceived and executed in the state tend to be small, and it’s hard to quantify their influence on the economy or the culture.
A new grant program is designed to help filmmakers produce their work and to document how even small film productions have a financial impact.
“We need to find Vermont solutions for a Vermont industry here,” Brian Carroll, a Corinth-based filmmaker and co-founder of the Vermont Film Production Economic Impact Pilot Program, said in an interview.
The program will award grants of up to $10,000 to several Vermont film projects. The emphasis is on projects filmed in the state by Vermont residents that make use of Vermont cast and crew and businesses.
The deadline for submissions is July 21, and the partner agencies, Film in Vermont and the Vermont Production Collective, plan to announce grant recipients in August. The aim is to bring in a variety of projects from around the state.
The program requires recipients to document how they spend the money, particularly on local labor and vendors for food, lodging and other necessities, and where the money was spent.
“This aggregated data will be used to demonstrate the industry’s value to key stakeholders and economic development partners,” reads a news release about the program.
While the program is funded this year with $50,000 from the Koopman Fund, a private fund that’s overseen by the Vermont Community Foundation, the data it collects is meant not only for private funders, but for state lawmakers.
The state has bankrolled incentives for filmmaking in the past, most notably through the Vermont Film Commission, founded in 1996.
The commission brought some high-profile productions to the state, but after its first decade it shifted to encouraging Vermont filmmakers. By 2013, it had morphed into the Office of Creative Economy, before petering out a year later.
Part of the challenge in Vermont is that there’s a surprisingly large number of people with filmmaking experience, but they’re all kind of hidden from each other. Actor and comedian Collen Doyle, co-founder of the Vermont Film Festival, memorably called the state’s filmmaking community “kind of a weird, disheveled scene” a couple of years ago.
“There are more people in the state than you might think, but not as many as in a larger population center,” Chad Ervin, filmmaker and president of the Vermont Production Collective, said in an interview.
Film in Vermont, which keeps stock of Vermont filmmaking resources, and the production collective, which organizes Vermont filmmakers, are trying to build something more durable by working with the state at its own scale.
In the meantime, the pilot program will help bring some Vermont films, most likely short fiction or documentary works, to fruition.
“If five to seven projects get made that maybe were on the cusp of not getting made, that’s a success,” Ervin, of Montpelier, said.
For more information, go to vtproductioncollaborative.org.
Grassroots filmmaking
JAM (Junction Arts & Media), in White River Junction, is making a feature film this summer. It seems tailor made for the new state grant program.
“Valley Transit” follows two people who meet on an Advance Transit bus and end up helping each other through some life milestones. The coming-of-age comedy is designed to highlight the sights and sensations of an Upper Valley summer.
It’s also the centerpiece of JAM’s Summer Feature Film Intensive, an education program that gives high school and college students a chance to work on a feature-length film intended for theatrical release.
For more information, go to uvjam.org.
More film
Travis Van Alstyne, a Chester, Vt., native now living in South Burlington, is the winner of this year’s Vermont Prize, an award conceived a few years ago by four visual arts organizations.
Though Van Alstyne isn’t an Upper Valley artist, his work is focused here. He made “Love of the Land,” an animated film about Romaine Tenney, the Weathersfield farmer who died by suicide after Interstate 91 cut his farm in half. He’s currently working on a film titled “The Barnard Panther,” after the last catamount in Vermont, which was shot in 1881.
