Starting Slant — Part 4

Down the Rabbit-hole of Funding in Canada

I’ve been working on a pretty badass API for creating beautiful interactive experiences on iOS — it’s called C4, and it’s great for animation, interaction and styling apps. A brief history of the project looks like this:

• 2010 fall — created a copy of processing / openframeworks that was built using objective-c, it was quick and dirty but replicated about 90% of the functionality those projects had at the time
• 2011 spring — re-built the project with some newer ideas: tighter control over rendering, started moving away from draw-loops, added layers
• 2012 spring — abandoned old Mac-based code, built a new version of C4 using iOS frameworks, ran workshops, summer residency, built the current website
• 2012 fall — officially launched the project with 100 examples and 10 tutorials, C4 was used to build ScriptKit
• 2013 — launched a ton of new content bringing up to 215 examples and 30 tutorials, used C4 in a ton of client work, taught workshops at places like NYU’s ITP Camp, C4 was used to build Pappy Tracker
• 2014 — Presented C4 at Resonate, continuing to build client work with C4, rethinking the future of the project

Okay, but what is it?

C4 is a creative-coding framework that lets you build expressive user experiences and create works of art. C4 gives you the power of the native iOS programming environment with a simplified API that lets you get down to working with media right away.

Technically, it wraps a handful of media frameworks into consistent objects that are easy to position, animate and style. It is based on Core Animation and mixes really well with UIKit, Core Image, Core Graphics, and AVFoundation. It also has a bunch of utility functions for math and vectors.

Early Funding

The early years of C4 were funded by the Alberta College of Art + Design, with support from the University of Calgary. And, throughout that time the project was positioned as an open-source creative coding framework that was positioned in the same domain as Processing, Openframeworks and Cinder.

Funding C4 at Slant

Soon after moving to Slant, I wanted to be able to work on C4 all the time. I thought the framework was extremely useful for building quick prototypes as well as providing a foundation for shippable products. Given this, I figured there would be some way in Canada of finding some funding to seriously push the development of C4.

Fool.

Finding funding for C4 in Canada became really tough. I started looking for funding sources and found that there were tons of different sources, but they all had specific rules and guidelines within which fitting C4 became almost impossible.

The following were some of the things I ran into:

1. I was no longer in an academic institution, so sources like NSERC dried up (more or less).
2. C4 is an open-source project, so bodies like IRAP wouldn’t fund it because the intellectual property was not proprietary. Also, IRAP wasn’t an option because C4 was pretty much “invented” so there wasn’t any spin on creating new innovative work (i.e. their interest is in creating new jobs for people to focus on the creation of new things).
3. There’s a bunch of work I wanted to do with the API, but the major task was essentially taking existing frameworks and molding them into something better. Since I was not creating new frameworks from scratch and not working on difficult un-solved problems, the chance of getting SR+ED funding became almost non-existent.
4. Even if I was solving un-solved problems and inventing un-invented technologies in a systematic way, SR+ED funding would com as a tax credit for work already completed. So, I’d have had to do the work already… This didn’t solve the issue of finding funding so that I could work on C4.
5. Funding agencies such as CMF look for cutting-edge products that have the potential for creating significant amounts of revenue. They’re not interested in supporting projects that are more altruistic in nature, i.e. directly funding an open-source project is not an option.

Having started at Slant and wanting to work on C4 full-time while generating revenue for the company seemed like a very hard thing to sort out… I was left floating a bit, but I didn’t stop looking for funding. I had a pretty good sense that there was funding to be had in Canada, but there were some very specific constraints for the kinds of projects that would be acceptable. So, I started thinking about different kinds of things that we could build around C4, using C4, and that would ultimately contribute to the development of C4 while actually being focused on creating a new kind of marketable product.

At the time, I was at a loss for how to do this, but I wouldn’t let that stop me.