Ottawa well-positioned for a studio
The Ottawa area has major capability in film and digital media, to a considerable extent coming out of both long-standing artistic development and supplemented by digitization from the Ottawa region high-tech sectors. Ottawa has the professional personnel and great outside-studio locations for filming. But Ottawa, unlike Halifax, Sudbury, Montreal, Calgary, and Vancouver, lacks an integrated, large-scale, studio facility. Other studios in Canada are currently turning away work. Ottawa is well-positioned to get ‘spin-off activity’, simply from work being turned away in Toronto, Montreal, and even Vancouver. A particular strength in Ottawa is digital animation. Several major firms exist in the southwest quadrant of the city, comparatively close to Barrhaven. They typically do work for major foreign studios/companies.
Opportunities for Local Growth
The investments proposed by the Ottawa Film Office would breathe new life into the vacant buildings at the NCC site (Woodroffe at Hunt Club), creating potentially more than 500 skilled jobs and generating an annual $40 million in economic impacts to supporting businesses of all kinds in the area.
Algonquin College has plans to further develop their School of Media & Design programming. The importance of a connection from the College to the proposed site will assist with our efforts to fast-track the LRT from Baseline, to the Hub, and through to Barrhaven.
LRT to our East-West Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) would close the loop and address some traffic, transit and transportation issues in our community. The BBIA is also asking that the City extend the currently-planned E-W BRT through to the Citigate Prestige Business Park, thereby further increasing the attractiveness of that ideally-located business park to interested business developers.
We also anticipate that, with both transit investments and close proximity of the proposed Hub, Barrhaven will see spin off growth from the success of the new facility and become home to some like and supportive industry stakeholders.
We look forward to your comments and questions as the proposal period progresses. If the project is successful, approval of the NCC lease is expected to happen in Spring 2019. Concept design work would then follow immediately in 2019.
Ottawa Film Office Commissioner, Bruce Harvey, will be joining us for our Tuesday, September 18th Breakfast for Business at Cedarhill Golf Club to discuss the proposal. Tickets may be purchased for $20 through the BBIA website.
For more information please contact Andrea Steenbakkers at execdirector@barrhavenbia.ca.