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Throughout all of 2009, while still living as an expatriate in Prague, Czech Republic (2005-2010), I engaged in a comprehensive overview of the Chinese media market in its two major marquee first-tier cities — Beijing and Shanghai — with plans to move to Shanghai to take up a career in the burgeoning local social media and underground independent film scenes. Just as I began to make concrete plans, God laughed out loud — as they say — and I was suddenly diverted back to my native Toronto, Canada, to attend to some urgently transpiring family business and a near-catastrophic experience. Since October 2010, I have been slowly rebuilding my networks across the US and Canada.

My professional activities these days consist of running my company, PMD-For-Hire (www.pmdforhire.com)’s day-to-day affairs, and attending film markets around the continent as I continue to grow my business and evangelize the PMDing concept.

PMDing is a rapidly growing production role which made its accidental debut sometime around 2007, as major Hollywood distribution companies and mini-majors drastically cut back on their large advance payouts — or mininum guarantees (MGs) — to independent producers for the privilege of exclusively marketing and promoting their projects.

It was during that same 2007 after a wildly successful festival run for his indie-financed international street art documentary — Bomb It! — that writer-director Jon Reiss unfurled his vision for the independent scene’s future with his notion of the “artist-businessman,” the equivalent of the indie scene’s “uber-mensch.”

From 2007 onward, Reiss decreed that filmmakers should no longer idly wait for those ultra-rare lucrative distribution opportunities, instead boldly taking their films’ destinies into their own hands by wading out into the marketplace to engage their audiences directly.

There are under a dozen active PMDs across the world PMDing on a full-time basis, and I am one of them.

Specialties

pmding, negotiation, podcasting, videoblogging, vanilla blogging, facebooking, trend-hunting, researching, mentoring, listening, managing money, English, Czech, French, Slovak, reading Russian, speaking languages, living in Europe, crossing-cultures, breaking boundaries, sleeping little, burning the midnight oil, China, North Korea, Sinology, Shanghai before the Wars, interwar history, history, thick tomes, thick books, the classics, film classics, film noir, crowdfunding, public speaking

For more on my skills and experiences, my LinkedIn page tells the longer story…