Today I attended the 7th Annual Montreal Self-Employed Artists’ Conference (tagline: Business Skills for Creative Souls). I was really hoping that this would be a good resource for developing our new media production company, 8Bit Brownies Inc. (web site coming VERY soon). Unfortunately, I found that a lot of the subject matter had nothing to do with the business side of having a company and everything to do with being an artist.

Let’s go through the day…

The keynote was presented by Kevin Tierney, producer and writer of Bon Cop, Bad Cop, a Canadian movie I never wanted to see because I’m not interested in Canadian culture or humour. His presentation was basically talking about the politics involved in making a cross-cultural film for both a French and English Canadian audience. It showed how annoying the government’s demands can be on film makers, and how important it is to market like Hollywood, but didn’t particularly teach me anything useful.

Following the keynote was a panel called “Grantsmanship”, which should have been interesting and informative since we at 8Bit Brownies Inc. have always been self-funded, but unfortunately fell short. Only two of the four panelists shared information, Heather McAfee and Christian O’Leary, while the other two panelists didn’t seem to know what they were supposed to talk about. Above all the rest, Heather McAfee saved the panel by having a well-prepared presentation with statistics and tips. Had the others been similarly prepared, this could have been a very informative hour and a half.

After lunch, Nancy Cleman, a Corporate Commercial Lawyer took to the stage to scare the living daylights out of everyone attending to tell them how restrictive copyright is. She basically put the fear of God Law into everyone attending and did not give any alternative solutions to the problems of traditional copyright. What she neglected to discuss where alternative options like publishing your work under creative commons licenses that tell the public what they can and cannot do with your content. After her presentation, she was whisked off the stage and although I would have liked to ask her the difference of American and Canadian parody (she adamantly pushed legal concerns on the audience by saying that Canadian parody is different from American, less broad, and that you should KNOW the difference!!! The problem is that she didn’t discuss whether Canadians parodying American content are subject to Canadian parody laws or American fair use laws). As a result, her presentation aggravated me… these attendees are artists and they should learn more than not to use other people’s work in fear of getting sued. They need to learn HOW they CAN use the work of others without being sued.

Robert Soroka later took to the stage and taught me everything I already knew about marketing… figure out who your target audience is and promote yourself to them without pissing them off with overexposure. Great, thanks.

And, lastly, before I left early out of boredom, there was a panel discussion with eight “successful” people who I’d never heard of… the most notable of which is Torill Kove, an Oscar-award winning animator from the National Film Board of Canada. This could have been interesting had these people been on my radar, but instead they were talking about how they became artists… nothing I need to know since I’m already there.

The major problem with the conference was that we, the artists, already KNOW how to be artists. I, personally, attended the conference in order to learn how I could do the dirty work of being an art entrepreneur (handle taxes, keep company records, get templates for releases, etc.). Instead, I felt like I was at an art festival with no art being featured.

The other problem I found with the conference was that it was very old media… meaning that they people didn’t seem very informed on new media issues. During the Grantsmanship panel, however, I asked the question “are there grants for new media professionals?”. Heather McAfee, the best speaker at savior of the conference, asked me to come see her later to discuss the new developing grants for “media arts” (which is apparently what term we fall under). We exchanged contact information and I hope to further the discussion on grants for Canadian new media professionals very soon.

The last general problem with the conference was the venue, the Centaur Theatre. It was freezing cold (at least %90 of the audience was shivering in their seats), attendees were banned from bringing water bottles into the theatre (I had the throw a $3 bottle of Evian into a garbage can and was told I can drink water from the bathroom tap instead… gee, thanks.), and there was no wifi at all… ugh.

I truly hope that (for the sake of artists everywhere) YES will work to stand by their tagline next year… I attended to gain well-needed business skills and didn’t learn a thing about business.