Their current Writer's Guild of Canada magazine has an article with the creator/writer of Sanctuary, Damian Kindler (his photo is on the magazine cover).
Taking Sanctuary: from Internet to TV
In 2006, revisiting a spec script he’d written a few years back, Damian Kindler decided to see where the web could take it. In the end, it took him right back to TV.
BY VERN SMITH
Damian Kindler’s sci-fi fantasy Sanctuary went from webcast to conventional television in two years. True, the original script, written as a spec sample in 2001, collected virtual dust for six years on a hard-drive until Kindler opened the file again in 2006. Kindler then took Sanctuary to the web and, before long, the coffee-breakers and the time-stealers watching online were hooked in real numbers.
Not that money was exchanging hands. Like many other artists to hit the web, Kindler’s work was getting downloaded free. Nobody was paying (well, except him and his partners). In hindsight, that’s the best Kindler should have expected. With files of all sorts bootlegged quickly, sales and encryption came to look like losing propositions. No, by the time Sanctuary hit the web, the only thing Kindler hoped for was enough freeloaders to make the networks say, hmm. Seems an estimated three- to four-million coffee-breakers and time-stealers gets that reaction. And he got their attention.
“Nobody could have done anything as daunting and foolish,” says Kindler, pausing, adjusting the settings on his iPhone from BC–“okay, there.”
“In 2006, we hired a company to design some midlevel special effects to put together a five-minute tease. We had this little pipedream. You know, ‘If we can get enough people worldwide for something they can’t get on TV, there’s a potential business model.’”
There was also potential for an ongoing story with fewer borders, both in terms of setting and viewers. Shot on a green screen with a red camera and virtual sets, Sanctuary has essentially gone from a well financed Do-It-Yourself production to an international hit, largely thanks to a running-start web push offering networks a new series with a built-in audience ready and wanting more.
Starring Amanda Tapping of Stargate SG-1, Sanctuary revolves around a hot 157-year-old, Dr. Helen Magnus, a scientist seeking to protect a secret population. Given that the internet also thrives on building secret and not-so-secret societies of people, the medium made sense as the venue in which to deliver the message. In 2006,Kindler was raising enough Burnaby dollars to bring it life, he just hadn’t quite figured out a way to make it a living, and draw cash-money from the web. With the world of online, Kindler says, “the ground is totally moving beneath your feet.”
Please see print edition for the full article.
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