Is there a process that you go through with every script that you write?ĭamian Kindler: Absolutely, there is an absolute distinct process that I go through. Why would I want to do that?” He said, “Have you seen how much it pays?” and when he showed me, I said, “Yes! Where do I sign?” I had script samples that I could show them, so they offered me a script and I started writing for that show … When my contract was up for renewal as the script coordinator - and I was quite good at it - they were terrified of trying to hire someone else… So a writer on the show said, “Hey, do you want to write a script?” I said, “No. They really liked my work and the way I viewed the show. I was working as a script coordinator for a Warner Brothers TV show called Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, starring David Carradine … I worked very closely with the producers. So anyway, how I ended up in TV is actually a shorter story than I am making it. Then she went and worked for the high-art Lama of Canadian feature films, and I started working on TV. It’s funny one of the people I knew very well at Queens was a woman named Simone Urdl, who’s been a producer of Atom Egoyan’s features for quite a few years … She wanted to go work for Citytv or CHUM and I was thinking, ‘TV? It’s the grindhouse of the lowest common denominator. I had a romantic love of feature films and quite a lot of disdain for television as a young man. When I was in University I did take film writing courses. But even at a young age, I had tremendous ADD. I was quite good at English and, like a lot of romantic young teenagers,, ‘I want to write the great Canadian/Australian/Irish novel’. When I was in high school, I really loved writing. more of a desire to pay the rent than carve out a niche for myself in the great canon of anything. | Courtesy of the author.ĭamian Kindler: I would say there’s nothing unique about the way I became a writer. Mike’s invite to the Vancouver launch of Sanctuary back in 2007. As a blast from the past, we’ve pulled that interview out of the archives and published it for you in its entirety below. Nonetheless, Kindler made some prescient predictions, and his comments give fascinating insights into how early adopters in the online distribution space foresaw sci-fi’s potential to make the internet a sanctuary for all. History shows that things did not develop as Kindler thought they could, and the ultimate success of Sanctuary owed much to the traditional TV network-based system it might have upended. On the eve of the web series’ Vancouver launch party in May 2007, and excited by Sanctuary’s potential to bridge the gap between fans and creators, Kindler sat down with The Companion contributor Mike Simpson and spoke at length about the production process and his hopes for online entertainment in the noughties and beyond. By anyone’s standards, it was an ambitious project, and since then Kindler’s career has gone from strength to strength – serving as executive producer on Sleepy Hollow, Krypton, and American Gods, and recently creating October Faction for Netflix. Sanctuary would be different on several levels: it would be available to download off the internet, it would be the first show filmed entirely using the state-of-the-art hi-def RED camera, and it would be almost entirely shot on green screen. John Smith, and star Amanda Tapping, to make a straight-to-web series called Sanctuary. To further his ambitions, Kindler secured funding from a Vancouver property development company, The Beedie Group, and recruited former Electronic Arts exec Marc Aubanel, IT specialist Martin Palacios, and fellow Stargate SG-1 alumni, director Martin Wood, producer N. Kindler, like many people, saw the emerging potential of the internet to open source everything. In what was contemporary tech’s equivalent of the Early Modern Era, there were no iPhones, social media wasn’t a thing, and Netflix was still distributing DVDs because dedicated streaming was still practically science fiction. Back in 2006, though, Kindler’s vision was innovative and optimistic. Multiple streaming services, millionaire YouTubers and behemoth tech companies are the norm these days. Drawing on experience gained working on a string of hit shows, he formed an indie production company, Stage 3 Media, with plans to challenge the major TV networks’ dominance over the distribution of small-screen entertainment using the internet. Around 15 years ago, fresh from being a writer-producer on Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis, Damian Kindler went rogue.
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