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Sanctuary's route to television a labour of love and sweat
Web show's producers find TV market but they're not out of the woods yet
Marke Andrews, Vancouver Sun
Published: Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Sanctuary, a Vancouver-made drama series, has broken new ground on a lot of fronts.
Originally shot for the Internet, it reinvented itself as an over-the-air television series with international sales. It raised funds through private investment, a rarity in Canada, where investment capital is almost non-existent. It was shot primarily without sets in a green-screen studio setting, the sets and background details later added digitally.
As a Web series, Sanctuary failed, not because it wasn't popular -- the eight 15-minute webisodes had four million viewers -- but because there was no revenue stream from a public used to getting Internet entertainment for free.
So the three Sanctuary executive producers -- writer Damian Kindler, actress Amanda Tapping and director Martin Wood, all veterans of the successful two Stargate TV series -- started all over again, making 13 one-hour episodes for TV, at $1.6 million per episode, funded by Vancouver-based The Beedie Group and "hundreds of thousands of dollars" of their own money.
Thus far they've earned licence fees from their main broadcasters (Sci Fi Channel in the U.S., ITV 4 in Britain, and Movie Central and The Movie Network in Canada), and will get income from DVD sales, but it may be three years before they earn their investment money back.
And they don't even know at this point -- five episodes have aired on Sci Fi Channel, with respectable viewership numbers -- if their broadcasters want a second season.
"We still believe [success] is possible," says Tapping. "We've personally taken a huge financial hit. We're not getting paid as executive producers and we've deferred our fees to try to make this property a success. But it's going to take awhile."
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