New program offers free training for northern Ontarians wanting to enter local film industry

If you want to work in the northern Ontario film industry, you can now be trained for free.

More than 150 people across the region are going through intensive training this week to get all the skills they need to work on a film crew. It's being offered by Cultural Industries Ontario North (CION) in Sudbury and North Bay.

CION announced the program at Northern Ontario Film Studios (NOFS) in Sudbury on Thursday, where some of the sessions have been taking place. 

The sessions take place over the course of a week and have participants learn about different aspects of being on a film crew. 

David Ottier is a senior sound mixer in the region and an instructor with the program. He says the sessions are a great step to attract more people to the local film and television industry.

"People who live in northern Ontario really need to understand how lucky they are to get this kind of exposure because in the south it doesn't happen. You need to ... go to school for it and then you're behind in debt for I don't know how many thousands of dollars," Ottier said. 

Ottier added that while the week-long training is an important opportunity for people looking to enter the industry, he hopes this kind of programming will grow.

He said locally, the industry is suffering some gaps in labour. 

"We have the gear, we have the studio, we need the people. We need the qualified people. And that's hard, that's tricky. 

"It takes years to train people at the level of which productions are showing up in northern Ontario. You have to be at a certain skill level and we have suffered through losing a lot of northern Ontario people to the south," Ottier said.

David Anselmo is the CEO of NOFS. He said the company has been trying to improve the region's infrastructure for the film industry for the last 10 years. 

"We want to break all barriers from having somebody come and learn and train and be part of this industry. So making it free is a way that we give back to the northern Ontario film industry," he said. 

He also echoed Ottier's sentiments around the issue of having enough skilled people in the local industry. 

"The resources of labour in any industry in Canada right now is very, very much stretched out and we see that in the film industry. Yes, we are a smaller market but we [will] also face those hardships too in the future so we need to start thinking about that now and this training is really what that's about," Anselmo said.