For 20 years, an award-winning local film production house has helped Windsor punch well above its weight in the global creative community.
We still make things in Windsor.
Tucked away largely out of sight on the eastern edge of Walkerville, Suede Productions is a cornerstone of Windsor’s creative community and an increasingly important featured player in commercial video work currently screening all around the world.
A boutique media company built around a “stem-to-stern” approach to film production, Suede has its fingerprints all over everything from web shorts to car commercials to internationally distributed feature films.
The Drive checked in with Creative Director and Partner Nicholas Shields to learn a little more about how the company’s grassroots origin story—and its coming attractions.
Now firmly part of the fabric of Southwestern Ontario’s creative community, Suede grew organically out of the University of Windsor when Shields—then an instructor in the Communication program—decided to collaborate with Cameron Hucker, Jordan Krug, and Aaron Hucker, three former students. “We started out of necessity,” recalls Shields, who still has a hard time seeing himself as a businessman. “We wanted to do these things, and nobody was hiring us, so we decided to start our own company. I think if you’re really passionate about what you do and really fixated on storytelling and able to be innovative there, the work will come.”
While many were initially skeptical of the viability of a full-time video production house in Essex County, Suede is now a major player in one of North America’s most surprisingly overachieving film communities.
“We’re on a little bit of an island here, 400 kilometres away from Toronto,” admits Shields, who understands Windsor-Essex will never be a destination film hub. “If you want to produce something here, it generally has to be homespun: conceived here and walked right through.”
To this end, when Suede releases a feature film, it has likely conceived, written, shot, edited, and distributed that project.
“If we do a commercial for a car company, we wrote that commercial, we conceived of it, we did the post-production on it, we shot it, and we delivered it,” adds Shields, noting Suede enjoys long-term relationships with major clients like Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz. “Because we’re here where we are, we have to rely on ourselves at every step.”
And so, step by painstaking step, Suede creates top-quality media content for world-class brands, regional business partners, and elite cultural institutions like the Stratford Festival more or less all within its four walls—on-location days excepted, of course. Beyond its in-house projects, Suede does substantial postproduction and special effects work on contract for outside parties, including platforms like National Geographic and Amazon Prime.
“On any given day, there are somewhere between 20 and 30 projects in some stage of production,” Shields explains. “There’s always something delivering, there’s always something very close to the finish line, and there’s always something a very early conceptual stage. There could be a car commercial in one edit suite, a film with effects happening in another, and somebody putting together a pitch deck in the next room.”
Suede typically employs between 10 and 12 full-time staff members, but for larger projects, its contracted ranks swell to several times that number by drawing from the broader local talent pool.
“The great thing about being in Windsor is there are enough experts and trained professionals in this region, if we need to expand our crew to 40 or 50 people, we have the talent locally to do it,” says Shields, who credits the local talent boom to the Windsor International Film Festival (WIFF) and the recent expansion of the University of Windsor’s film programs. “We leverage that often. We are just big enough now to have that kind of skillset across the board, which is pretty amazing.”
A founding member of WIFF, Suede continues to create “pre-roll” content for the festival, which regularly screens its productions.
“WIFF punches way above its weight,” raves Shields, who was heavily involved in programming during the first few years of the then-fledgling festival. “It’s a large feather in the cap of this region.”
Shields is specifically enthusiastic about WIFF’s relentless commitment to screening local work. “As a young filmmaker, you will get your film shown—often your very first small project,” emphasizes Shields, namechecking the Mark Boscariol 48-Hour FlickFest. “I think that’s a massive motivator for people to be in the business.”
As a working filmmaker who has screened Suede productions in dozens of film festivals around the world, Shields is in a privileged position to assess WIFF’s comparative operational standards. “It’s a well-oiled machine,” he confirms. “Only under circumstances like ours do you realize how well WIFF is run.”
Currently, Suede has been on the global festival circuit with Vampire Zombies from Space, the local filmmaker and professor Mike Stasko’s 2024 satirical horror-comedy. According to Shields, the run has been wildly successful for a local production.
Suede’s latest feature, Depraved Mind, has also won awards at international film festivals and is eagerly awaiting its streaming release.
Other new work includes the four-part original series Never Doubt I Love (Shields describes it as “half Shakespeare, half musical”), which has begun airing on STRATFEST@HOME, the Stratford Festival’s digital streaming platform. It’s the latest in a long series of productive collaborations with the Festival, including several filmed stage productions—Cymbeline being the latest—which Suede directs, shoots, and produces.
Coming soon: a four-episode Bell series Landmarks and Lunch, two films, A Winter’s Tale from the Festival, plus another series. (“We don’t have a problem getting work,” says Shields modestly.)
What’s more, celebrations may soon be in order: Krug and Cameron Hucker are nominated for a Canadian Screen Award (essentially Canada’s Oscars) for their editing work on the Joni Mitchell episode of the Northern Tracks: A Canadian Mixtape web series.
The nod is only the latest in a long line of credits to the local film community, which would look very different if not for 20 years of Suede.
“We have a pretty amazing film community in this region,” says Shields. “It’s a pretty tight group. It’s not small, but everybody knows each other and supports each other, because we’re not competing with ourselves.
“We’re competing with the globe.”
