Viral marketing, social media, and crowd-sourced funding. All these terms are important in the area of independent film-making. Currently, our city (Toronto) is knee deep in glitter and glitz as the Toronto International Film Festival has taken over. Therefore, we thought it would be relevant to chat with industry insiders on how they use social media and crowd-sourced funding to both finish their project as well as promote it. And we also ask about viral marketing: Are kittens really the secret?

Janine Short is a Producer and Production Designer for the upcoming indie film, Mr. Viral. Coming from a theatre arts, acting and fine art background, Janine Short attended Ryerson University for Radio and Television Arts, where she focused on producing, writing and production design for film and television. She started her career as an office manager at Notch Inc, a film transfer house specializing in color correction, where she learned a great deal about post production. She then moved on to produce and post produce numerous commercials as well as viral marketing and corporate video for Edge Productions, a production and post production company at MacLaren McCann Advertising.

Alex Appel is a highly accomplished actress who stars as Stacy in Mr. Viral. She has appeared in many television programmes including Little Mosque on the Prairie, Da Kink in My Hair, and as a regular on the American series Missing as FBI Agent “Janey Cooper”. Alex’s film appearances include A Beginner’s Guide to Endings starring Harvey Keital, Tom DiCillo’s, The Real Blonde and The Life Before Thiswith Catherine O’Hara. She also starred as Alice Blue in the critically acclaimed and multiple award winning feature film The Death of Alice Blue, which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2009, screened at Montreal World Film Festival and travelled to over forty film festivals around the world.

Both ladies joined Karim Kanji in the studio to talk about the importance of social media in independent film.