As part of a new initiative from the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), students at the School of Media will now receive financial support for their final projects and will be supervised once they graduate to help them advance their professional careers.
The structuring and multi-partner project TREMPLIN, as it is called, offers funding of $780,000 over five years that comes from figures in the film and television industry, such as director and former UQAM student Denis Villeneuve and the Malo Foundation, both major donors to the initiative. The Association québécoise de la production média (AQPM) is also involved to offer, among other things, industry support.
The director of the School of Media, Catalina Briceño, made the announcement and launched it Tuesday morning in the Jean-Claude Lauzon room at UQAM. In an interview with The Duty Moments after the event, which brought together members of the Media School and various industry players, Mr.me Briceño explains that the idea, “as in many cases” was born “after a crisis.” In the case of TREMPLIN, it was “the extinction of the René-Malo chair, which financed the production of final-year projects, and the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Since then, media production students have had to finance their projects largely themselves while facing “galloping cost inflation.” “We may have the best cameras and the best filming equipment for our students, but just renting a truck to take the stock out of UQAM is expensive,” summarizes the director of the School of Media.
An “important issue”
The result? “A huge inequality between those who have the means to finance their graduation project and those who don’t,” explains Catalina Briceño. “I couldn’t tell you how many spaghetti dinners or social fundraising activities they have. And then it always ends up with us digging into our pockets, or asking mom and dad,” she says.
“It’s part of the educational approach to structure financing for a film or TV show project, but it shouldn’t consume 60% of students’ time and energy. They are there to create and implement the best projects,” she says.
The first part of TREMPLIN therefore aims to address this “important issue” by offering an amount “equal to each end-of-year project,” says M.me Briceño: Some of the funding also comes from the students themselves, through mandatory institutional funds that are included in their tuition fees. This has “convinced donors and partners to get on board,” she notes.
A solution that is seen as a “relief” and “good news” for Jessica St-Germain, a third-year student in the Bachelor of Television program at UQAM. “I think it will take away the stress of having to go and get money. It will allow us to put that energy into our end-of-year projects instead,” says the woman who also participated in the consultation process for television students for mandatory institutional funds.
The second part of the project consists of “structuring and systematizing” support activities for graduates to help them make the leap to the professional world, in particular through the support of industry players who are at the heart of the initiative. For example, TREMPLIN could finance the trip of a student whose project is presented at an international festival. “We can work together to better prepare them and with you as well to better welcome them,” Catalina Briceño told the members of the industry present at the launch event.
Hope for sustainability
The initial funding is planned for a period of five years, during which the four bachelor’s degrees in the media production component of the School of Media—cinema, television, interactive media and cultural and media production strategies—will be served by the TREMPLIN initiative.
After these five years, the wish is not to abandon TREMPLIN, but to grow the project. At the end of the funding, Catalina Briceño hopes to “be able to perpetuate this initiative. So, we are giving ourselves five years to demonstrate the relevance of perpetuating a vehicle like this.” The funding for interactive media programs and cultural and media production strategies “has not yet been deployed,” but it will be over the first five years of the initiative.
The Media School, however, has six programs. Two are therefore excluded from this first wave of the initiative: journalism and digital media programs. “We had to start somewhere, so we chose the media production programs,” explains M.me Briceño: But there is absolutely nothing that would prevent a vehicle like TREMPLIN from also serving to enrich the curriculum of other programs.