The First Weekend Club is a grassroots organization dedicated to increasing the initial box office returns of Canadian films. Why is this important? The length of a movie's run in theatres is dependent on the amount of business it does on its opening weekend. In order for small Canadian films to have a chance against major US releases, more Canadian film fans need to buy tickets to a film on the first three days it's open.

With the support of Canada's major film distributors, provincial film bodies and Telefilm Canada, the First Weekend Club uses various traditional and guerilla-marketing techniques to boost attendance at Canadian film launches. By tapping into the energy of local fans they increase the viability of our homegrown Canadian film industry and promote Canadian artists in a sustainable, market-driven way.

The FWC needed a web site that could communicate their values directly to the movie-going public. The site needed to be very clean and elegant, with easy-to-access information about each film that they promote. As a grass-roots organization dedicated to artists and manned mostly by volunteers, FWC also needed a back-end solution that would be extremely easy to manage.

After a city-wide competition, iCAT Media Inc won the job based on our experience in database design, a very competitive quote and our demostrable passion for the buisness of Film.


Chief Programming subcontactor Mike Rogers created a customized movie database that tracks all the details about an FWC supported film: everything from Director and Stars to Awards Earned. The software tracks the movie from "Coming Soon" to "Now Playing" to "Archives" with minimum work from FWC administrators. We can show at any given time what theatres the film is in across Canada, when it's playing and we can then direct viewers to theatre web sites where they can purchase tickets on-line. The whole site is also searchable by Actor, Director, Release Date and Genre.


The FWC communicates with their members by e-mail. As part of our solution for them we created an easy-to-edit HTML e-mail template that they can customize as they require. We also manage their e-mail membership lists coordinate the sending out of mass e-mail campaigns on a monthly basis.

We built an easy to use customized HTML template for FWC's monthly e-mail campaigns.