BCBusiness

MATThEW ChEn FACTOID B.C.'s creative sector generates over $4 billion in GDP and supports 85,000 skilled jobs in B.C. F or those planning a Christmas vacation to California this year, the decline of the Canadian dollar is a major bummer. For B.C.'s †lm and TV industry, however, it's the best Christmas present ever—with anecdotal evidence of one of the busiest †lming years on record. Creative BC is the provincial agency that oversees †lm and televi- sion production in B.C.—from development funding to shoot locations—and since 2013, it has also championed the interests of interactive and digital media, music and publishing. Prem Gill—a longtime broadcaster and content strategist, born and raised in North Burnaby by her immigrant parents—took the reins of the agency in late Sep- tember at a critical time in the creative sector's history. Your first media job after graduating from SFU with a bachelor of communications was co-hosting a show called "Youth Raap," on a radio sta- tion owned and operated by influential South Asian broad- caster Shushma Datt. What was that about? It was a call-in show, and it was the only show in English; everything else was in Hindi or Punjabi or other Indian lan- guages. Today it would be called a podcast! We were trying to get our youth engaged. Back then, every Indian family had Shush- ma's station on in their kitchen. Prem Gill T h e C o n v e r s a t i o n From there you started work- ing with City TV, hosting and producing a bunch of shows before ultimately moving behind the scenes. As I was developing, I started to think, "Maybe it's time for me to start developing more of my corporate skills, my business skills." I started doing more government relations, running programming—like CineCity, a short-†lm program—and then became director of govern- ment relations and regulatory a‡airs for CHUM and moved to Toronto. When Telus launched their TV product, they asked me to come back to Vancouver as director of content. The video-on-demand ( VOD) service was just starting, and one of my jobs was †guring out what channels we needed to launch and how we did our VOD programming. There were fewer than 50,000 customers at that point; now they are edging toward one million. And then, o‡ the corner of my desk, I always managed all the community programming commitments—which is kind of more my wheelhouse. The †re- in-the-belly thing. You come to Creative BC at an interesting time. It's two years after the agency was created—follow- ing the merger of the B.C. Film Commission and B.C. Film + Media—and with an Creative BC's new CEo on the challenges facing the province's cultural industries and lessons learned from the private sector by Matt O'Grady B.C. Culture Beyond tHe sCreen 58 independent record labels 1,000 new and reprinted titles from B.C. book publishers annually 1,000,000 readers of B.C. magazines expanded mandate to repre- sent other media. Why do you think the board picked you? I feel like I do have a broad set of experience in industry. I've been a producer. I've worked a lot with music, through my job at Telus. I was co-editor of a magazine with my siblings called Rungh—a South Asian arts magazine funded by the Canada Council. My thing has always been about story- telling: helping, SoURCE: CREATIVE BC DECEMBER 2015 BCBusiness 17

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