Making Your First "Real Money" Short Film

You've made films with friends. Now you want to do it properly — working with ACTRA, insurance, deal memos, the whole thing. Michael Peers and Yasmine Majchrzak break down what the jump to a "real money" short actually looks like, and share what they've learned from taking their work all the way to international markets and pitching competitions — including a recent win at the JETS Initiative at Berlinale. A free workshop from local filmmakers Michael Peers and Yasmine Majchrzak. Free.

Yasmine Majchrzak is a NL based actor and filmmaker whose journey into film started through her work as a wildlife ecologist, where she assisted crews in capturing unique footage of wildlife for several nature documentaries. Her short film A Fish Story premiered at the Silver Wave Film Festival where it was nominated for Best Atlantic Short and screened at the Edmonton International Film Festival. Yasmine was selected for the 2024 CMPA producer mentorship program and she completed her internship at Sara Fost Pictures.

Michael Peers is a writer/director based in St. John’s, NL who started writing professionally through his work as an ecologist. He has written articles for scientific and popular magazines and was awarded the Governor General's Gold Medal for his work on conservation philosophy under climate change. While researching snowshoe hares and Canada lynx at a remote cabin in the Yukon, he was involved in multiple wildlife documentaries that spurred an interest in film. Since then, he received the Jane Leblanc NL creative award, and his short films A Fish Story and Technophobic have screened at national and international film festivals. Michael recently shadowed the Emmy-nominated director Helen Shaver on a Netflix limited series, and he is writing and directing the Telefilm funded feature documentary Invasivore which explores the invasive species issue through the lens of people eating them as a method of control.