By Etan Vlessing
IT’S A LIVE TV PRODUCER’S worst nightmare: Take eight months to get the Canadian Screen Awards off the ground, then cancel your in-person, live gala ceremony just before going to air due to a sudden coronavirus pandemic spread, and then be forced to pivot online with entirely preproduced segments.
That’s what confronted the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television suddenly cast into disarray last March by a world in the grip of a Covid-19 crisis.
“You don’t make money by cancelling a show two weeks out. It threw us into a bit of a financial panic,” Beth Janson, Academy CEO, told Cartt.ca on Tuesday.
However, with key sponsors like the CBC, CTV, Telefilm and the Canada Media Fund deciding to stick with their funding commitments and agreeing the show should go on without waiting for the public health crisis to end, the Academy and the Canadian industry regrouped.
And the result this week is Canada’s national screen awards streaming presentations of 2020 winners on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube channels, as well as academy.ca from Monday May 25th to Thursday, May 28. Anyone on Twitter will have also seen a steady stream of award-winning tweets and retweets. (Pictured is the whole crew of CTV’s The Social, celebrating 
their win.)
Janson, along with Louis Calabro, the Academy’s vice president of programming, on Tuesday pulled back the curtain on how they were able to finally hand out trophies in 144 categories with entirely preproduced shows for online streaming while navigating the coronavirus pandemic.
“We wanted to try and take the elements of ceremony and boil it down to its essence,” Janson said of the initial creative discussions with Canadian broadcasters and funders who themselves were forced into a virus-driven industry lockdown.
First, what the Academy and its industry backers didn’t want from its pandemic-era shows was winners making acceptance speeches from their living room couches, hackneyed opening of envelopes and no stripped down “ceremony” online.
As canny Canadian creators long used to working with whatever is at hand to tell stories, the Academy eventually decided to mine the series footage offered up by industry nominees and introduce narrators like Eric McCormack, Herbie Kuhn and Lloyd Robertson to share and amplify to Canadians the best of the industry’s content produced and viewed worldwide over the last year.
In other words, the Academy opted for that most quintessential Canuck story-telling tool: the documentary.
“We thought we had hundreds of hours of beautiful footage from our nominees, and we would have been using this footage to create our broadcast and off-camera shows. Let’s explore and use that footage as the centerpiece of the online virtual presentation. And with that, let’s look for and talk about narrators that would introduce categories and announce nominations over top of the nominated images,” Calabro told Cartt.ca.
So gone was the traditional award show presenter announcing a winner, followed by acceptance speeches. “It’s anticipation building, but we broke that down to an online moment with graphics, text and music,” Calabro explains.
The producers also fashioned eight pre-taped, online shows into thematically-distinctive genre groups, including broadcast news and sports programming on May 25, kids and lifestyle programming on May 26, scripted shows on May 27 and the culminating cinema arts on May 28.
“It’s unusual for someone to sit down and watch a two-hour live stream of appointment viewing online,” Janson says of the decision to create more bite-sized virtual shows for sport fans, as an example, or film lovers.
However, while the pandemic-era Canadian Screen Awards has no hosts working from a basement studio, the shows themselves were developed and produced while creative worked remotely and under our government-imposed lockdown restrictions.
Janson says it’s too early to see how streaming a radically different Canadian Screen Awards has impacted viewership, and 
which innovations may continue in future editions of the national film, TV and digital awards.
The Academy boss isn’t even ready to predict the Canadian industry, nominees and winners will be able to celebrate face-to-face next year with the 2021 edition returning as a physical event.
“Next year’s awards, we can’t say anything about that yet. We don’t know anything. There could be a second wave. We’re heading into financial challenges. Everyone’s lives will be changing a lot in the next few months,” Janson explained.
She pointed to how the Canadian industry ultimately pulled together to produce the pandemic-era Canadian Screen Awards as inspirational. “Everyone wishes that none of this had happened. But it’s just been a huge team effort. Everyone on the team pitched in for an inspiring, creative project,” she added.
Please click here and follow the links to the awards videos.
