Brian Sharp wants to limit the amount of time that film crews waste making and communicating creative decisions, and he’s launched a company to solve the problem.

Onset Communication Inc. is a Charlottetown-based company that is now completing its 12-week stint with the Propel ICT accelerator. As a member of the advanced Build program, Onset will be one of the startups presenting at the Propel Demo Day on June 21 in Halifax.

Onset has developed a communication system called Visual Assistant that helps film crew members communicate with one another instantly in a more visual than verbal way. Film crews often communicate now by using walkie-talkies – a verbal tool in a visual medium. Another product on the market offers a single video monitor for each camera, but lacks the portability and collaborative features of Visual Assistant. Crews are frequently bogged down as a few members need to iron out some detail, like the head of photography telling a gaffer to redirect a spotlight. It holds up the whole production and increases overtime costs, which can add $50,000 an hour to production costs.

"One of the biggest problems on set is the amount of time it takes to make and share creative decisions,” said Sharp, the company’s founder and CEO, in an interview in Charlottetown last week. “Onset turns 10-minute conversations into 10-second decisions.”

Onset rents out the Visual Assistant kit featuring tablets loaded with proprietary software and a server to film crews so people can instantly send out a visual message – that is, a still shot or video with instructions written over it. It means a crew member immediately understands the message and can act without holding up the whole crew.

Sharp, a 25-year veteran of the film industry, has teamed up with Co-Founders Peter Workman, a developer with expertise in image processing, and David LeBlanc, the acting chair of the computer science department at University of P.E.I.

Read about the Local Demo Day in Charlottetown

Sharp said his business model relies on renting out the kits rather than just providing software because a film company will need a glitch-free tool that works the first time and every time. “If it’s a mission-critical tool in the film market and it’s buggy, they won’t ever use it again,” he said.

Each kit would last about three years, and produce about $1.3 million in revenue for the company.

The market is massive, he said. There are 50,000 films made every year around the world, and the film industry is now worth $500 billion a year and growing. Sharp estimates he has a total addressable market of $4 billion in recurring revenue, and that Onset could chalk up $8 million a year in sales in Toronto alone.

What’s more, he said the company has had “100-percent product validation” in that he has yet to explain Onset to anyone in the film industry who hasn’t instantly agreed the product is needed.

Onset has already two clients to test the product – a film company in Halifax and a Toronto ad agency that films its own commercials.

Sharp is looking for $500,000 in investment. The company now has a prototype and needs the funding for certain upgrades requested by customers and to beta-test it with the clients.