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spk00: Thank you for joining us. We are here to provide a corporate update and report on Thunderbird Entertainment Group's first quarter fiscal 2022 results, which ended September 30, 2021. Speaking on today's call are Ms. Jennifer Twiner-McCarran, Thunderbird's President and CEO, and Ms. Barb Harwood, Thunderbird's CFO. Ms. Twiner-McCarran will provide a strategic overview of Thunderbird Entertainment Group and Ms. Harwood will review the company's first quarter 2022 financials. Following the corporate update and financial review, the call will open for a question and answer session. If you would like to ask questions during this time, simply press star, send the number one on your telephone keypad. Alternatively, if you have any questions, you can call 1-604-683-3555 or email investors at thunderbird.tv, and the company will follow up directly after the call. At this time, all lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. I'd like to remind everyone that certain statements made on today's call will be forward-looking and constitute forward-looking statements or forward-looking information under applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements and information discussed on this conference call include but are not limited to statements with respect to the company's objectives, goals or future plans, and the business and operation of the company. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based on a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause actual results at future events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include but are not limited to general business, economic and social uncertainties, litigation, legislative, environmental and other judicial, regulatory, political, and competitive developments. Those additional risks set out in the company's filing statements and other public documents filed on CDAR at www.cdar.com and other matters discussed in the company's year-end news release. Although the company believes that the assumptions and factors used in preparing these forward-looking statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on these statements, which only apply as of the date of this presentation, and no assurance can begin that such events will occur in the disclosed timeframes or at all. except where required by law, the company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. For your convenience, the press release, the MD&A, and audited financial statements for the first quarter 2022 of Thunderbird Entertainment Group, which ended September 30, 2021, are filed on CDAR and are available online under the Investor section of our website. We do not expect to update forward-looking statements continually as conditions change. This conference call is being webcast live, and the archive will be available on the company's website at www.thunderbird.tv following today's call. Please note that Thunderbird reports in Canadian dollars unless otherwise stated. Ms. Twyner McCarran, We'll now provide a corporate update. Thank you so much.
spk01: On behalf of everyone at Thunderbird, I'd like to welcome you to this morning's call to discuss our Q1-22 results, which ended September 30th, 2021. My name is Jennifer Twyna McCarron, and I'm the president and CEO of Thunderbird Entertainment Group. I'm here today with our CFO, Barb Harwood, and as always, we're both very thankful to have you join us. We hope all of our American friends had a wonderful Thanksgiving, hence the spacing between our PR and this call. We wanted to make sure we were not interrupting any of our special holidays, which of course are different between Canada and the U.S. Once Barb and I finish our updates, we'll be very happy to answer any questions that you have. Regular followers of the company are aware of our ambitious goal to become the next major global studio. At Thunderbird, we're not content with the status quo, And our teams are committed to pushing ourselves creatively to stand out and differentiate our work from other content producers in the market. With quality as our North Star, we want to create, own, and distribute award-winning factual, animated, and scripted content worldwide. And we are laying the framework to achieve this. We are focused on producing and distributing premium content that attempts to make people happy and feel empowered while providing a connection and a much needed escape. Our goal is to create content where we can all see ourselves reflected in a positive light, no matter our race, gender, or cultural background. During last month's year-end 2021 conference call, we shared how Thunderbird's current success is the result of initiatives put into place years in advance. This includes investing in top talent, owned IP, opening additional studios in Ottawa and Los Angeles, launching a consumer products and global distribution division, and building trusted relationships with companies like HBO Max, Nickelodeon, Discovery Channel, Netflix, Apple TV, Disney+, NBC Universal, CBC, among others. Essentially, the top-tier streaming and traditional broadcasting companies that are hungry for quality content to attract and retain subscribers and audiences. We also shared how we are continuing to build on this by creating a strong foundation to support exponential growth. While challenging, the pandemic forced us to look at our current way of doing things and emerge stronger and nimbler with the added ability to attract talent from across the globe within a remote working structure as we're no longer confined to our studio walls. Since the pandemic was declared, Thunderbird has added 430 new full-time members to our crew, and the company now employs more than 1,400 people. We also have 27 productions on our production slate. Fiscal 2022 is a key year to continued success as we see it as an incredibly important build year, a year where we will be laser-focused on the initiatives and business structures that we need to facilitate our strong long-term growth. Naturally, this involves strategic and thoughtfulness around the content we choose to produce, and more targeted efforts around acquiring incremental IP. IP is so important to our growth strategy because it provides ancillary revenue opportunities in toys, merchandise, music, gaming, all cross-media exploitation, you name it. To this end, Atomic Cartoons, our kids and family division, pitched more new series to platforms worldwide this calendar year than in any other year in our history. And We will start to see the results of this in fiscal year 23 and into 24 and beyond when Atomic begins working on some of these new productions. We can't wait to share with you the types of productions that our teams will be bringing to the screen. The progress at Great Pacific Media, which we know as GPM and Thunderbird's factual division, is equally exciting as we added more IP series to our production sites. We have previously shared our delight around the renewals for discovery of our legacy IP properties, Highway Through Hell, Heavy Rescue 401, and Mud Mountain Haulers. And we commenced work on three new IP productions that were ordered to series by Chorus Entertainment, Styled, working title, seems to be announced, Got Job, and Dead Man's Curse, which is also the working title, all of which we're really proud to say and excited have BIPOC leads. Adding more scripted series to our production slate is also incredibly exciting for us, with productions like Strays airing on CBC and a fully-owned U.S.-facing scripted series titled Reginald the Vampire for SyFy, which is now in the works and being shot right now. As you can see, our portfolio is expanding, and we're so proud of the productions we are putting our name behind. And on that note, we also can be more thrilled to work alongside Wapana Talk Media's Tanya Coney-Gauthier and Shirley MacLaine on productions that support Indigenous creatives in the entertainment industry and showcase authentic stories that increase Indigenous representation in media. We have come so far in terms of representation for women entertainment, but we still have so much further to go when it comes to representation of all women in media. The most recent Women in View on-screen report shows, for example, that in 2019, of the 43% of women in key creative roles in TV and film, only 6.44% were Black women and women of color, while less than 1%, 0.94%, were Indigenous women. This same disparity exists across every measured category in film and TV, which is why authentic and equal representation of BIPOC women is a key focus for our team. We see equity, diversity, and inclusion as not only the right thing to do, but something that positively impacts our bottom line. A McKinsey and Company study shows that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 25%
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