GRIN founder Victor Oly and filmmaker Ben Christensen, a.k.a. TikTok star Dangerbean55.Jason Vaughan/Supplied
For many Canadian filmmakers, there has long been a traditional path into the system. You go to film school, beg for grants and maybe scrounge up enough private money to produce a micro-budget film, hope that it plays a festival or two, and then look around in despair as you realize that there’s not all that much room for growth. And this is one of the best-case scenarios.
Yet for the Toronto-based filmmaking collective that goes by the name GRIN, there is a path to sustainability – in both art and commerce – that extends beyond the more familiar and distressing route.
“Today, it’s audience first, funding second – for so many years before, it felt like the opposite,” explains Victor Oly, the director and editor who founded GRIN while attending Toronto Metropolitan University. “You make something, then you find your audience for it, and that lessens the funders’ risk because they know that a community has already been built for them. That means being scrappier early on, but you can see the trajectory has worked with filmmakers like the Philippou brothers. And you also just get to have fun with your friends, too.”
In just six years, the friends behind GRIN – which consists of Oly, actor-slash-producer Jack Copland, the Copenhagen-based cinematographer Tobias Scavenius, Tokyo-based composer Sam Pomanti, with frequent contributions from filmmaker Ben Christensen, a.k.a. the TikTok star Dangerbean55 – have placed a big bet on themselves instead of the system. Without turning to arts councils or such government funding agencies as Telefilm, GRIN has raised tens of thousands of dollars through a landscape that values the almighty power of audience-first virality. Whether it’s merch drops, brand partnerships, or crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and, most recently, the crypto-backed streaming platform Shibuya, GRIN goes where the audience is, with the hopes that funds will follow.
So far, the team has produced five viral shorts (including the dark and slick thriller Pink Rabbit, which has been recognized at film festivals everywhere from South Korea to the Netherlands), and are developing a handful of large-scale projects, including a horror-comedy that, in Christensen’s words, is “essentially Barbarian set on a ski hill.” And they’ve been able to develop precisely because they’re working in opposition to long-held expectations when it comes to emerging Canadian filmmakers.
The GRIN team has produced five viral shorts so far.Jason Vaughan/Supplied
“There have been two barriers to entry in the film industry: getting grants in a public system like here in Canada, or figuring out venture capitalists in the U.S., both of which can feel so unattainable,” says Christensen. “But with the internet, you can bypass the middleman, go straight to the audience, and get feedback in real time.”
To wit: About a year ago, Christensen made a “reel” on Instagram – a bite-sized clip that streams past users like a drop of entertainment in a waterfall of content – about the frustration of losing socks while doing a load of laundry. The surreal and absurd 90-second clip, which ends on a moment of surprising poignancy, quickly amassed more than a million likes, with thousands of comments from viewers imploring Christensen to turn the clip into a feature-length film.
Today, the GRIN team is hard at work on just that, having already extended the idea into a 15-minute short titled The Funny Things About Losing Socks now streaming on Shibuya (a nascent platform that allows fans to greenlight future projects from featured creators).
After taking screen-shots of the comments posted on his initial video, Christensen, used the feedback in GRIN’s pitch meetings with investors.
“Look, people are literally asking for this,” says Christensen, who has more than 1.5 million followers spread across Instagram and TikTok, having amassed 61.5 million “likes” on the latter service. “That’s a very cool space that hasn’t necessarily existed before, and we’re trying to capitalize on that.”
The journey hasn’t been as easy as simply letting the Insta and TikTok algorithms wash over you, though. For the past six years, GRIN has been grinding it out, self-financing their projects with the hope that audiences would become as invested in the GRIN brand – whose sensibility can perhaps best be boiled down to “genre-bending provocation” – as the content itself.
The group, including producer Natasha Advani Thangkhiew (second from left), have a close-knit friendship which feeds into their work.magaly captura/Supplied
As actor and producer Copland says, “the first couple projects we did were self-funded, but we’d also have these fundraising events, which itself isn’t a new idea except the way that we handled them – they were tailored experiences for our audiences, so that they became connected not only to the film but the company.”
The group’s close-knit friendship also helps. Copland met Oly when the two were in high school, the pair making short films to impress their friends. Oly then met Christensen while studying at TMU when they lived in a house together with “13 people who liked to call ourselves comedians.”
While a theatrically released feature would be nice, the team has recognized other avenues to success that are more firmly in their grasp. And they’re confident that they’ve found a path that works for them – and so many other Canadian filmmakers whose expectations are coming up against the reality of an industry that’s exceptionally tremulous.
Which brings up an interesting, almost existential question for the friends: Because of their border-less reach, and their collaborators are spread out across the world, do they consider themselves, well, Canadian?
“For us, we’re 100 per cent Canadian filmmakers – we have the privilege of growing up here and living in an extremely diverse and cultural city, and that’s what shapes us as artists,” says Oly, who notes that the name “GRIN” comes from a Canadian-esque concept of a smile that holds a slightly darker edge. “I think our perspective is what makes our films Canadian – it’s not about setting it in a certain city, or applying for Canadian grants.”
Not that GRIN is opposed to the system of grants, either.
“I was just at the Durham Regional Film Festival, which was amazing, because you’re watching all these shorts and see the logos pop up at the end in terms of funding agencies, and I think that’s amazing, that we have that system,” adds Copland. “But we’re going to try to make it happen no matter what. And part of how we do that is because we live in Canada and have our own artistic perspectives.”