Went to Master Classes with Alan Poul (Swingtown, Six Feet Under), Doug Ellin (Entourage), and Hart Hanson (Bones) -- all highly entertaining in highly diverse ways -- so I'll have something on some of those at some point. Instead of reports on their talks, though, I'm hoping to eventually connect the dots with a few running themes of the festival and see what various speakers had to say about a subject. That's the goal, anyway. The other way is easier.
Ran into Will, who's at least as entertaining as anyone on stage but I'm sure he'll share his own stories on his own blog.
The keynote speech that feels like days ago but was really this morning was presented by Richard Florida, economist and author of Rise of the Creative Class and Who's Your City. His thesis (in my layman's oversimplification) is that the creative class -- not just artists, but any industry where the real resource is the innovation of its employees, like the IT sector, or even Toyota -- drives economic development of cities, and that particular cities foster the creative class better than others.
I'd love for someone to compare his philosophies with the Canadian television industry's philosophy of spreading production across the country instead of developing our own "Hollywood." Doomed to disaster? Though I hope to write something on his speech, that won't be my article: I don't have the insight or the research time for that.
Actual Banff-related posts coming soon. Tonight's the awards, so I'll do a quick write-up about the winners which should make it up on Blogcritics tomorrow morning. The rest will come when I make time to write about the speakers instead of listening to the speakers. Another full day of sessions and an interview tomorrow. That's not a complaint - I wasn't going to come to Banff this year, wanting to horde my holidays this year, until I realized that combined with a trip "home" to Alberta, this is one of the things I wanted to do with those horded holidays.
The Festival has a snippet of Florida's speech available:
