You'll sometimes hear that Vancouver, BC, Canada is the third-largest movie-production centre in North America, after Los Angeles and New York. But it's only somewhat true.
There is no movie-making industry here in Vancouver. What there is, rather, is the American TV industry. There are no Producers here in Vancouver. What there are, rather, are production companies who exist so that American companies can partner with them to get Canadian tax credits.
There are five kinds of movie-makers in Vancouver:
1) Students, who have to make short movies for their programmes. They have the luxury of drawing from a pool of equipment (the school’s) and crew (their fellow students). Once they are out of school (graduate, drop out, flunk out), they rarely make another movie, although they usually spend a few years in a futile quest to raise money for a project. They sometimes move into the second group.
2) Dilettantes, who make short movies that they pay for out of their own pockets. (Nobody makes features, because cast and crew can't work for a solid month with no income.) These movies are rarely completed. If they are completed, they are rarely seen by anyone outside the family and friends of the principal movie-maker. In those rare cases where the principal movie-maker actually follows through on his promise to give copies to his cast and crew, the audience increases by the precise number of family and friends of the cast and crew. This doesn’t say anything about the quality of these movies; a small minority of them are actually quite good.
3) Professionals, who work on American productions. Canadian indie producers can’t afford to hire them. Every wannabe movie-maker in Vancouver aspires to join this group. It is interesting that these wannabes never consider that they won’t get to make their own movies; they’ll always be working on other people’s projects.
4) Videographers, who shoot weddings and corporate events and perhaps TV commercials. There are fewer opportunities in this field all the time, as the equipment available today has advanced to such a degree that an amateur with a Canon T3i and a copy of iMovie or Windows Moviemaker can do a good enough job at capturing that speech by the Vice President of Corporate Morale.
5) Pornographers, who are usually three friends: one guy who owns a camera, one guy who’s excited at the idea that he’ll get to fuck a random girl, and one friend who’s been dragooned into helping. To judge by the postings on Craigslist, for some reason these guys seem to have difficulty finding actresses.
Vancouver is not a good city for the independent, micro-budget movie-maker.
If you want to act, you can work for free on lots of short movies, some of which may even be completed. You do these until you have enough of a showreel that, with a little talent and a lot of luck, you can get paid to play a character in a scene or two on an episode of Arrow or Psych. Just don’t come to Vancouver expecting that you can make a living acting.
If you are a cinematographer with your own state-of-the-art camera -- and, even better, your own lighting kit as well -- you can be working for no pay on every weekend you have off from your day job.
If you want to make your own movies, don’t come to Vancouver at all. There’s no point.