JOB POSTINGS: JUST GETTING STARTED - INDIGENOUS ENTREPRENEURS
Aspiring entrepreneurs take note: aboriginally owned businesses are thriving all across the country, and now is the perfect opportunity to take advantage. Not convinced? We compiled a list of five up-and-coming and already successful startups by young aboriginal entrepreneurs.
Janelle & Jérémie Wookey: Wookey Films
Creatively, Franco-Métis siblings Janelle and Jérémie Wookey are totally in sync 90 per cent of the time. The other 10 per cent, they fiercely disagree. As co-founders of Wookey Films Inc, a production company that specializes in documentary and non-fiction television programming, the duo has successfully transformed their combined seven years of experience in Winnipeg's CBC/Radio-Canada newsroom into a nationally respected business.
Long story short, we became obsessed with the family camcorder in the summer of 1998 and now we have Wookey Films Inc, says 27-year-old Janelle, adding that the pair's dynamic is unique in that they both have a direct hand in writing, shooting, directing, and editing any given project. Somehow it works. We're still in the process of finding and defining our individual roles.
Based in Winnipeg, Wookey Films was launched in 2012 and has since seen several projects go to air across the nation. Our biggest project so far is Mémére Métisse, which is a half-hour documentary that premiered on opening night of the ImagiNATIVE Film Festival in Toronto back in 2008, says Jérémie. It's a doc about our grandmother's coming-to-terms with her Métis identity. We were also really excited to be a part of the 8th Fire series, where we produced, directed, wrote, shot, and edited 12 short documentaries, mainly about Métis identity.
Despite the initial positive response, Janelle reminds aspiring producers and entrepreneurs that media is a tough business to crack. In fact, their luck can be accredited to working entry-level positions at CBC and APTN. This isn't a project that started a year ago when we scaled our hours back at CBC and took the preliminary three-day small biz workshop, she says. It's something we've (sometimes unknowingly) been working towards since we were kids fooling around with the home video camera, through to the creative communications program at Red River College.
They both believe Winnipeg is an incredible city for a company like Wookey Filmsone of Canada's only Franco-aboriginal production companies'to thrive. They both claim, you can't beat the people here!
According to the Wookey Films' website, the company aims to produce content from a young and modern perspective. The pair believes they belong to a very unique age bracket; right in the middle of Generation X and Y and Janelle says they've grown to understand how to reach out to both. This is especially relevant for corporate and commercial projects designed to deliver messages to these demographics.
Over the course of the last year, what we've been able to learn is that there's a lot to learn and no one place to learn it all, says Jérémie. There's a million pieces to the puzzle and you have to collect them from all sorts of people'from accountants to sound recordists. It seems it's a jump-in-and-learn-as-you-go process.
Janelle agrees. Ultimately, (and we know this is a total cliché), for the two of us to be able to make a living doing what we love to do, never dreading going in to work'that is success, she says. And if we can nab a Gemini while we're at it, that would be okay too.